Robert Fillman

Robert Fillman on "Witness" 

When I wrote "Witness" I was thinking of a friend who always had a complicated relation to animals. He was an outdoor enthusiast who exhibited a genuine appreciation and love for the natural world, but he was also an avid hunter and fisherman. This poem is based, in part, on a true story, though one I heard about only in passing and years after the fact: the killing of a pet rooster. Of course, as writers do, I fabricated many of the details to dramatize the narrative. 

I tend to put people in my poems. I am interested in why people do things. For example, what drives an otherwise unassuming person to commit what many would consider to be a barbaric act? What justifies it? Alternately, what causes a person to feel remorse? I'm also interested in the idea of inaction-as-violence and the dynamics of spectatorship: when is a person obliged to intervene? When is a person willing to ignore signals of suffering or distress? 

As I see it, "Witness" has three principle players: the alleged perpetrator of violence (the neighbor), the witness (the speaker), and the confidant (the reader). In arranging this triangle, I am hoping to open up some narrative play. Because readers receive the information second-hand (from a witness whose reliability may be in question), and because the supposed agent of violence remains voiceless (and off-screen), it is difficult to know what really happened. There is also a deliberate use of the conditional mood—adverbs like "probably," "maybe," and "perhaps"—which is meant to give as much insight into the speaker's state of mind as the neighbor's. 

As to my work as a whole, I think I am most comfortable writing lyric narratives like "Witness." I want there to be a surface accessibility to my poetry, so readers can reach the end of a poem and feel confident that they understand the general contours of the plot. I also want readers to feel at ease with the speaker's delivery. I aim for speech that is natural and relatable, but I also want there to be a lyricism to it. This poem may seem like free verse, but it is actually written in syllabic verse: every line is seven syllables long. I particularly enjoy working with that line length because it closely emulates everyday speech, registering a kind of phrasing that allows for the pauses and breaths we experience in conversation. This type of line construction also enables me to play with enjambment and image, and hopefully achieve some surprising effects. There is something really fun about working within a form and then trying to push the boundaries of it.

All of this is to say: What I really hope for is a second reading. I want the subtler dimensions of the poem to come to light, and I want that to happen gradually. In "Witness," the outburst of violence committed against the bird is at the surface. It is the core act. But it is also kind of a red herring, as the style of narration and somewhat impressionistic details that emerge are what, I hope, prompt a deeper engagement with the psychology behind the story.   

ADRIAN MARKLE

What’s Left on the Bone by Adrian Markle

A colleague was telling me about a project that he was working on that involved maritime churches, and he mentioned a historied local church called “The Church of Squalls,” which I thought was just such a remarkable name and I started getting ideas for a story immediately. So I steered the conversation away from that particular topic, as I was already getting an idea in my head and didn’t want it to be spoiled by facts; I think fiction that is just a thinly veiled relaying of true-to-life facts is self-limiting. I made it a point to learn absolutely nothing about this building and its associated community and history and then changed the name of it, so really any resemblance to the real place or a real person is totally coincidental (and I think highly unlikely).  

Most of my writing is about male relationships, which are often fragile and stunted things when they exist at all—this character’s strongest relationship is with his dog, who is obviously non-verbal, which is tied to his inability to speak up for himself when he’s feeling exploited. The lack of strong or stable social relationships is equivalent to a lack of social safety, so this story ultimately became an exploration of the vulnerability a person without a personal social safety net might experience when he or she comes up against one of those “charitable” organizations that is ultimately out to further their own cause first.  

In terms of craft, my writing tends to be hyper-focused in terms of time. Flash like this often takes place over the course of only a few minutes, short stories a few hours, and the novel I’ve recently written for my PhD takes place over the course of a few weeks. I think fiction is at its best when it shines brightly on a single significant moment for a character and then fades out, so that image lingers in relief in our minds. I think by being as lean as possible and stripping out all elements that aren’t essential to this one moment, we increase the significance of all elements that remain; for someone that’s starving, like this narrator and his dog may soon be, each bite of food will be more significant emotionally than it would be if food was plentiful. Every scrap of meat left on the bone is draws the hunger of the eye.

So here I knew I wanted to write about a character in a socially and financially precarious position—like so many people in marginalized communities are in right now—in the moment where he either chooses to take care of himself at the cost of further isolation or to further endanger himself while preserving social connection, and then I included only the elements I thought were absolutely necessary for the leanest version of this story, stripping everything else away in editing and hopefully leaving only the bare, exposed bone of emotional truth.

David Axelrod

David Axelrod on “Scene with Cranes”

The first drafts of “Scene with Cranes” emerged in the autumn of 2016. 

The title, as many readers will recognize, is borrowed from a piece of incidental music Jean Sibelius wrote for his brother-in-law’s play, the unhopefully titled Kuolema, that is, Death in Finnish. It’s my understanding that a couple in the play have a child delivered to them, as in Finnish folklore, by a migrating crane. Given the play’s title, you can likely guess the rest.

Sibelius, however, reworked the incidental music into what I think we can properly call a tone poem that depicts in fifty-nine measures what its title describes. My familiarity with the music is entirely through my obsessive listening to Gidon Kremer’s arrangement of it for string orchestra. It’s the first piece performed on the Nonesuch album De Profundis by the Kremerata Baltica. 

The contrasts between the wandering melody played by the first violins and the darker-toned gravity provided by the second violins in the opening measures fade, but later return as anxious sforzandos in which the violins, joined by viola, cello, and double bass, answer the plaintive calls of two cranes in the voices of clarinets. 

The drama and moodiness of Sebelius’s music surely gave shape to my attention that cool, still morning four years ago, as I bicycled along the margins of Ladd Marsh in northeast Oregon. There were many dozens of Sandhill cranes present in harvested wheat fields, who had arrived overnight to join earlier arrivals. They rested and foraged, and periodically squabbled among themselves and with an unlucky coyote who passed too close.

A storm was then approaching from the Gulf of Alaska, so I understood they were staging for departure southward and would soon begin calling out to others dispersed around the marsh who would join them as they spiraled higher and higher, and eventual vanished into the blue. The cranes would not return for another six months.

The improbable observations, scribbled later that day onto a piece scratch paper and from which the poem emerged, noted that grain fields are “a message from chlorophyll”—absent in those senescent fields then—and “there’s the time of the body’s memory and the time of a tree’s memory.” I must have wondered how awareness accounts for radically different domestic worlds than one that’s strictly human, and at the same time how imagination might incorporate these other forms of cyclic time, memory, imagination and knowing. 

The urge for going, as Joni Mitchell sang long ago, is countervailed here by rootedness in and familiarity with the rituals of place. The frustrations and satisfactions of the domestic world share the same space. And obviously, the poem shares as much DNA with Kuolema as it does with Sibelius’s tone poem, though the emotion that emerges at the end of the poem is inflected by climate crises, extinction, and the loss of certainty in the resilience of life that once stood as a consolation for mortality.

As for this particular poem’s network of objects and phenomena that emerge at the periphery of awareness, simply reading through its imagery is evidence enough of what environmental factors revealed themselves and constellated the poem, though the familial drama that also plays out in the poem suggests other points of origins far more personal than observation of any external world. 

Given my familial roots in the rural Baltics, I surely am prone to a heritable melancholy in autumn that is peculiar to northern latitudes, and it was in full operation that morning Sibelius and migrating cranes converged there in the Grande Ronde Valley. What I didn’t know in the autumn of 2016 was that, after thirty-one years, I would leave the Grande Ronde Valley permanently and return to the place where my household first formed and had remained “half-finished.”

David Axelrod

Missoula, Montana 

Connie Post

Connie Post on “In the Arc of Evening”

The hypnagogic state is the state right before sleep, where your mind is most open, most lucid. It is a state most unbound to the constraints of our earthly existence. I often see things at this time, visions in my brain, in which I am lifted from this time and place to another time and place. Sounds crazy, right? Maybe, but I feel like in this state, our minds are able to expand in remarkable ways. I have used this unique state of consciousness to gather images or thoughts that sometimes serve as kindling for good poems. ”In the Arc of Evening” was born of my hypnagogic state. I infused the elements of insomnia as part of the poem in order to describe how these images can also be disturbing and wake me from sleep. But eventually, we all must fall asleep and face what is waiting for us. As I struggled to rest, I started to wonder how did people get to sleep centuries or thousands of years ago? Was there a sleep shaman who helped them? Were there teas and elixirs? Did they hear the animals outside rustling around? Did they travel forward in time to find me in a bed in a room and whisper their secrets in my ear? These are all questions that preceded my writing this poem. 

I believe that as poets, we must expand our minds beyond what we see and hear in this world and imagine ourselves as another part of history. How would we love? How would we survive? Would I die in battle or alone in the woods? During these late nights, my imagination gets a good work out. I think we need to exercise our creative minds in ways that expand the right brain. I have a fair amount of existential angst, and sometimes, it makes sense to use that to build a poem. I spend time wondering about how whole societies have collapsed and when ours might collapse (especially now in light of the pandemic and the particular fears we are living with). At times, I can go too far with my imagination and the poem does not work or does not appeal to the reader in the manner in which I intended. But that’s okay because I think we should consistently be in the discipline of challenging our brains to think in different ways. 

Late at night, when everyone in the house is asleep but me, my mind travels to these long-ago places.  One night I dreamed I was a bird flying over Stonehenge. It felt so real. This is the place where poems can begin.