Making of a Poem: Leopoldine Core on “Ex-Stewardess”

For our series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Leopoldine Core’s “Ex-Stewardess” appears in our new Summer issue, no. 244.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase, or something else?

Often a poem begins wordlessly. It’s as if the text is a reply to some cryptic spot in the back of my brain that I have become attracted to. I’m alerted to the presence of something that isn’t solid. It has more to do with feeling, tempo, scale, and temperature. I’m so focused on that emanating region that, even though I’m using words, my experience—the start of it—is wordless and meditative.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? (Are there hard and easy poems?)

Some poems come quick and others take a while. But maybe the one that took years was easier in the end—I don’t know. Certain poems require many rounds of rewording. When this happens I will rewrite one line forty or more times, then narrow it down to thirty, then fifteen, then five, then choose.

But this poem was realized fairly quickly and required zero rewording. That happens sometimes. I tried rewording certain parts at different points but always wound up reverting to the original. The editing I did consisted of deleting maybe seventy percent of what was there, changing the order, capitalizing certain letters, and adding line breaks. I might have added a comma but I don’t think so.

Were you thinking of any other poems or works of art while you wrote it?

Occasionally my friend Jane Corrigan will send me pictures of her paintings and drawings. There are two she showed me around that time—one is a pen drawing and the other is a Xerox of that same drawing that she drew over with pen and colored in with pencil. Jane’s images are infused with such narrative possibility—I like to stare at them for a long time, putting order to the plot. This one seems like a scene from some lost Jane Bowles story.

I wasn’t thinking consciously of these drawings while writing the poem, but there’s something so joyful and stimulating about discourse with friends. I like talking about art that isn’t mine.

What else were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this poem?

I was reading a collection of interviews with the filmmaker Claude Chabrol. I underlined this sentence—“I like mirrors, because they are a way of crossing through appearances.” He was talking about manipulating space but I was drawn to a conceptual meaning of the statement—how something solid that reflects the surface of things can also function as an entryway, a portal.

I was listening to Tangerine Dream, Ryuichi Sakamoto, “Dance II” by Discovery Zone, and this mournful song “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms,” performed by Mia Farrow in The Muppets Valentine Show in 1974. I love how sincerely she sings to that puppet. She sounds a little like Nico. And there’s something about the confluence of optimism and despair in her voice that might have influenced me.

It also seems relevant to mention that I had gotten an aura photo taken around that time—I kept looking at it. The aura photo I had taken a few years before was mostly red with a cloud of yellow and orange. I was told at the time that the color red implies a closeness to Earth.

But this one was so blue. I kept wondering what that meant. Where was my spirit in relation to Earth? Was it farther from Earth now? I was—am still—grieving the loss of someone I love dearly, and looking at the photo made me think of a sky within.

What was the challenge of this particular poem? 

Writing in code. And leaving room for interpretation. The metaphors are there—the stewardess, travel, the dog, the sky, et cetera—but they can also be taken literally. They are what they are and they are something else too.

The poem could be about someone who really reincarnated all these different times and remembers those past lives—though I was thinking more about how we reincarnate many times within a single lifetime, both in terms of how we are seen and in terms of how we really are. We are reborn in the sense that we transform. And yet we carry impressions of the interminable past within us.

I was also thinking about the experience of being objectified over and over. And how those experiences can shape one’s worldview, their sense of what is possible and impossible—and also their sense of time. Stewardess is a dated term that seems, in the poem, to be asking, But has anything changed? Can one really be an ex-stewardess if the treatment is the same? Then it becomes a question of hope—what it might be made of. The poem ends with the act of drawing “an imaginary / animal,” by which I mean the self, and “a field and the / sky”—by which I mean the world. It felt important to depict selfhood in the throes of the imagination—one who works to escape an external gaze, knowing they are not limited to how they are seen, knowing they are multiple.

 

Leopoldine Core is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the story collection When Watched, which won a Whiting Award and was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in The Paris Review, PEN America, Apology Magazine, The American Poetry Review, BOMB, and The Best American Short Stories, among others. She has taught at NYU and Columbia University.

Making of a Poem: Kyra Wilder on “John Wick Is So Tired”

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Kyra Wilder’s “John Wick Is So Tired” appears in our new Spring issue, no. 243.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

With the first line. It was something I’d thought a lot about—I run marathons, and in those tense few days before the race, when I’m drinking water and carb loading and meditating on what’s going to happen, I watch John Wick, specifically because of the way Keanu Reeves runs. He looks so tired, but he’s winning. 

In the fall of 2021, I was tapering for a marathon and then I had to go to a funeral, and suddenly my John Wick time got invaded by real grief. And John Wick was good for that, too. 

What were you reading while you were writing the poem?

I was reading a lot of Ian Fleming that fall. I got pretty obsessed with the fact that he included a recipe for scrambled eggs in a James Bond story. In that story, Bond is completing some kind of mission in New York but also being really whiny about the poor quality of American eggs—to the point that he’s wandering around the city going into bodegas and criticizing them. So, it was either going to be “John Wick Is So Tired” or “James Bond Could Make You Some Pretty Good Eggs.”    

Where did you write this poem? 

That glissade is in there because I was writing in the car, waiting to pick up my daughter from ballet class. I write all over—sometimes even at my actual desk. I have a print from Bas Jan Ader’s I’m too sad to tell you on the wall. There’s nothing better to stare at when things are going badly.  

Did you show your drafts to other writers or to friends or confidantes? If so, what did they say about them?

I showed it to my husband. He’s a math guy and doesn’t read poetry, but he’s usually right about my writing. When he read the first draft, he liked the first half but said he “didn’t get” the ending. Reading that draft again now, I see what he meant. 

That version was maybe more like a novel or a short story. We’ve started with John Wick, but by the end we’re lost in the desert. It’s chatty, reaching for all the conversations that are being missed—the speaker wants to watch John Wick and tell the lost person historical asides about nuclear bomb testing sites. Of course they do, but that’s for a novel. In the context of a poem, it’s too much, too close together. I’m hitting the meaning-gong too many times. John Wick (the character, the movies, the Keanu) is so good, and the poem is about this one feeling of where-are-you-right-now-how-could-you-miss-this-one-particular-thing, so we need to stay with John Wick and forget the desert. 

After I found an ending that felt more specific and focused and safely clear of novel/short story/essay territory, I sent a copy to my agent, Jon Curzon. He told me he’d once made an Instagram account called Keanu Leaves, which was just full of pictures of Keanu Reeves waving goodbye. 

How else did the poem change over time?

I wrote it without stanzas at first, and then decided to break up the poem following the speaker’s thoughts—where the thinking shifted, or where I thought they might pause or take a breath. The stanzas got me closer to the person speaking—they helped me hear how the speaker would say the lines. 

As useful as they were, though, the stanzas made the poem too dramatic. They looked like they were trying too hard. We’re starting with a hatchet thrown at someone’s face—we don’t need the additional histrionics of white space. Then it was all playing with line breaks. One of the drafts has two lines with single words. It’s not that I was thinking I might eventually end up with one-word lines—it was that I was breaking the lines up everywhere and leaving them for a while to see how they looked. I was just pushing things around, moving lines back and forth and reading it again every few days. I would open the document, break up lines, and leave it for a bit. 

Once I got the poem to the point where, when I looked at it fresh, there wasn’t anything I wanted to change, I sent it off and left it for dead.

Kyra Wilder is the author of the novel Little Bandaged Days.

Making of a Poem: Timmy Straw on “Brezhnev”

For our new series Making of a Poem, we’re asking some poets to dissect the poems they’ve published in our pages. Timmy Straw’s “Brezhnev” appears in our Winter issue, no. 242.

How did this poem start for you? Was it with an image, an idea, a phrase?

There’s a scene I used to picture a lot as a little kid in the eighties—two people dancing slowly, closely, their bodies seeming to know and anticipate each other, only they are also separated by a screen, so that neither has ever seen the other’s face. This was, I think, one way I understood the world at that time. This dance (so I imagined) is what formed reality itself—Reagan’s America, Gorbachev’s Soviet Union—and the dancers’ mutually blind position was like an engine, driving the world on. This made-up scene, and my adult memory of it, was certainly a major goad to the poem. So was a weird little detail—one of my older brothers could never understand that my one-year-old self was not, in fact, a teenager like himself, and so would read to me from The Annals of Imperial Rome and the most turgid high school astronomy textbooks. Because of his mania for geopolitics, he also taught me how to say “Brezhnev”—so that, awkwardly, the Soviet general secretary’s surname was one of my first words.

How did writing the first draft feel to you? Did it come easily, or was it difficult to write? Are there hard and easy poems?

“Brezhnev” was written in late lockdown, at a point when I’d taken to swimming a lot—I had some vaguely science-y conviction that the massively elevated public-pool chlorine levels would be incompatible with covid. I liked to work out poems in the pool (in my head—no waterproof paper was involved), and the first draft of “Brezhnev” had something in it of the satisfying pull of a solid hour of the Australian crawl. It was spookily easy to write, maybe because it is largely narrative, even a little cinematic. The sense was less of pursuing a new poem, with all its hidden laws and strange hostilities, than of becoming increasingly interested in the sequence of images appearing in front of me. In fact, when the first draft was done, reading it back felt a little like looking at a VHS film on pause—the tension and blur of the vibrating image.

But yes, there are definitely poems that are quick to write and poems that can take years! I’m thinking of a poem (“The Thomas Salto”) that started in 2016 and then proceeded through probably fifteen-plus inadequate iterations over six years before arriving, last year, at something I can live with. Poems begin like migraines do, I think, and you get rid of them with similar rigor—albeit not with aspirin, quiet, and a dark room, but by writing and writing them down until they go away (hopefully into their completedness, most often into their failure!).

What were you listening to / reading / watching while you were writing this?

I was reading an essay by the Russian poet Olga Sedakova called “Mediocrity as a Social Danger.” In it, she quotes this luxuriously doomful line from Goethe, which I lifted—“You are a disconsolate guest on this dark Earth.” Sedakova’s essay is audacious, lucid, problematic, and sometimes surly. (At one point she notes, by way of a casual aside, that human will can be summarized as follows: “to ask for or refuse a drink, as on the cross.” To which I reply, Yikes! But also, minus the Christian referent … maybe.)

I was also listening to a lot of Bach (Varvara Myagkova’s recordings of the preludes and fugues) and to Future’s “Mask Off” (the remix, with Kendrick Lamar). I like to think these songs had an effect on the poem’s form on the page, the way interstitial words like and or some are accented through the quickness and harshness of the line breaks—I was particularly wanting to get some of the bare and almost dingy beauty of the counterpoint in Bach’s Fugue in E minor from Book 1, and the skittering play of the snare against Kendrick Lamar’s verse on “Mask Off.”

What was the challenge of this particular poem?

“Brezhnev” is expressly autobiographical, which is not a kind of writing I generally do, and I find it a little scary—not for reasons of “vulnerability” but because such writing is embedded with the impossible imperative to “get it right.” By “getting it right” I mean being true to the dignity of the people—in this case, my family—whom I’ve dragged into the poem, and who know very well the place and time and circumstances of which “Brezhnev” is a (smudged) mirror. If a poem is explicitly autobiographical, then by rights it exists not only for the sake of itself but for the actual, named people in it—i.e., people whom I love and who, while “in the poem,” are also at this very moment out there on earth, doing and thinking and feeling things. All this made me nervous, and so, while the first draft came quickly, I fiddled with subsequent drafts for ages.

I also spent a lot of time sorting out its form—in writing “Brezhnev,” I had begun working in this new way, breaking the line according to a predetermined margin setting such that the emphasis lands, sometimes aggressively, on words that bear no meaning in themselves (and, the). This skews the attention, I think, toward operations and functions in the poem and away from people and things (sort of like shining a spotlight not on the actors and props but on, say, the electrical outlets on the stage floor). I also wanted the poem on the page to invoke a cat’s cradle—the kids’ game that thematizes, with great simplicity, the notion that if you tug on one thing, everything moves. A pretty good summary of Cold War geopolitics, and, I guess, of our own historical moment.

Do you have photos of different drafts of this poem?

I don’t usually keep drafts around, partly out of laziness and partly because I don’t want to look back and turn into a pillar of salt, but I do have an early draft of “Brezhnev.” You can see the three long stanzas, with a couplet overdramatically wedged in there toward the end, plus some unnecessary exposition, the first bit of which I had the wherewithal to remove. The last bit (the final six lines), however, I kept, until Chicu [Srikanth Reddy, the Review’s poetry editor] wisely suggested I redact it. I had wanted a denouement, some pleasing display of concluding truth (whatever that is); but he saw something far more interesting—the torque achieved in its refusal.

 

 

Timmy Straw is a poet, musician, and translator. Their poems “Brezhnev” and “Oracle at Dog” appear in our new Winter issue, no. 242.

 

My Royal Quiet Deluxe

When I was in my twenties, my grandparents finally moved out of the house my mother had grown up in. In the attic where we used to sleep as kids, and where my grandfather would come in at bedtime and sing “Goodnight, Irene” to me and my younger brother and sister as we lay in a row in our little cots, I had found my mother’s typewriter, a Royal Quiet Deluxe, perfectly preserved from her high school days. My grandfather was the sort of person who would make sure it was in pristine working order, and when I opened the case, the keys gleamed. It didn’t even need a new ribbon. It made a satisfying, well-oiled clack.

I lugged it to the house I was living in on School Street, in Northampton, Massachusetts. I had moved from California back to the same weird little valley where I had gone to college, to go to graduate school for poetry. Thankfully I did not yet know that a manual typewriter was a writerly cliché. For a while, the typewriter just sat there in the corner of my room.

I was still toiling away, writing a lot of poems the way I used to: choose a subject, and try to write something “about” it. Use a computer. Those poems always felt labored and ponderous. No matter what I said, the thoughts in them were never new. Nothing was being added by my writing. I had already figured it out, and mostly it was banal and obvious. Death is sad. The city, if you have not been informed, is lonely at night. In it, other people are mysteriously uninterested in me, which is sad and lonely for me, and for them, whether or not they know it.

Occasionally I would try to let things go completely, and exert as little control as possible over the language. Those poems were a mess, and I would stare at them afterward with bored incomprehension.

My bedroom on the second floor of that house on School Street tilted alarmingly. A row of poorly sealed windows looked out onto the street and other crooked little houses. A giant morning glory had taken over the backyard, and I marveled at how its purple flowers would open to admit the pollinators, and then close in the afternoon and die. The next day new flowers would do the same thing.

Winter came, and a cold wind constantly blew through the room. Sometimes flakes of snow would somehow appear inside. A ring of frost on the lip of a glass. I was growing more and more frustrated with the destabilizing ease with which I was able to continually write and erase words on a computer. Things were always happening too fast, and changes were being made and unmade with alarming frequency. The poems, in their clean, professional fonts, looked so much better than they were. More often than not, I couldn’t stop myself tinkering long enough to figure out what felt right and true to me. I desperately needed to slow down.

My new existence felt barely tethered. I thought nothing in my life mattered, and I was willing at a moment’s notice to alter it. This made me careless and cruel. An equivalent lack of responsibility manifested in my writing. I was always willing, recklessly, to change anything in the poem to make it more musical, more strange, always skating along the edge of irrelevance. While this makes one an awful boyfriend, friend, brother, or son, I think it is an excellent place to be as a young artist. It hones one’s skill and teaches the line between intuitive meaning and pointless weirdness.

When I gained a small audience of fellow poets in graduate school—who became friends who deeply mattered to me, and whose work I read, too—something began to change. It would be a long time before I’d come to understand how much these connections meant, in life and in writing. But their presence affected me deeply as a writer. Not only was I finally in a place where other people were serious about poetry, I began to think about them while I was writing. I was able to imagine them moving through the poem. I would move things around and imagine what the effect would be on my readers. And I moved through their poems too, marking where I was baffled or uncertain, always considering the possibility that things could be in a different order. On the one hand, I felt a growing freedom and understanding of the composition process, which could sometimes feel dizzying. On the other, there was the actual, physical presence of readers who gave direction to that freedom.

***

In a desperate attempt to get away from the limits of my own emotions and experiences, I began walking around the quaint little town, along streets canopied by trees full of blossoms, in a permanent unhappy daze, gathering lines and transcribing in my notebook whatever I heard in my mind. What I saw became words, not just to describe what I was seeing. I was also collecting stray thoughts, memories, observations, jokes, comments, questions, strange bits of language on signs or the sides of passing trucks; whatever I saw, overheard, and thought, with no discrimination. Each house seemed to emanate a friendly, familial light. I told myself I wasn’t writing poetry, just lines, most of which were not particularly promising, but I kept collecting.

I didn’t realize it at the time, because I was only vaguely familiar with surrealism, but like those misunderstood idealists I was trying to maintain a more or less constant dream state while I was awake, so that many lines would come to me and bridge the gap between reality and the unconscious. I was also obsessed with a particular group of artists, Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), whose most famous member was Wassily Kandinsky. They operated in the space between figurative art and abstraction, and their gorgeous, colorful canvases shimmered with the twin energies of representation of the world and the intimation of all that was beyond mere representation.

I wanted my poems, like those paintings, to reflect and engage with reality while also pointing always to something beyond it, something I did not truly understand or grasp but could feel was there. I desired the presence of both worlds in my work, and had no idea how to summon either, much less both. Out of desperation I began setting my alarm earlier and earlier and getting up just to assemble those lines, along with others that I had written earlier and cut out of poems that were not working. Most of the lines were not good. I wasn’t sure what to do with them, other than retype them and try to move them around, again and again, until something felt like a poem.

I signed up for a workshop with James Tate, whom I worshipped. The feeling was not mutual. We both suspected I could not write any good poems, and the evidence appeared weekly. It was early spring and, I remember, very cold. Winter dragged on. I brought in poem after poem, and like the weather they just got worse. One week I read with a growing sense of dread as I heard my voice in the room, and Jim looked at me for what seemed like a very long time. Then, with one hand ceremoniously turning the paper over in the air, he placed it with exaggerated care back on the table, facedown, saying just one word: “No.”

In rearranging these lines, I wasn’t writing poems exactly, just trying to connect things from different times I had walked around to see what suggested itself. I was looking for anything that meant something. I searched through them for clues or signs, a faint suggestion of a scene or situation.

I did this for many weeks without much success. Then, without warning, I realized that the lines were collecting themselves into a scene, like in an auditorium when an orchestra is warming up before the performance. Those disorganized sounds become the real performance, the one that happens before the official one begins. The audience rises and applauds. Guided by something nameless, I kept writing and putting things together with a new instinct, or maybe an old one that had at last emerged. The poem felt in some way both lighter and, for the first time, essential, though (or perhaps because) I couldn’t say what I was doing.

I brought the poem to class, but strangely, for the first time, I did not care what anyone said. After I read it, Tate looked up at me, and gave an enigmatic “Huh.” Then he spoke for a long time about what he liked. But I did not really listen. I had already learned something about writing poetry, something that could never be forgotten.

***

In that little room overlooking School Street, surrounded by snow, I began to type many versions of whatever poem I was writing, over and over again, on the Royal Quiet Deluxe, which was not quiet at all. Each time I was done I would yank the poem dramatically out of the platen and stare at it, maybe making some marks. If I wanted to see what the change would look like, I’d have to retype it, even if it was just a single word. The process was slow, meditative, hypnotic. I could work for many hours like this. The sound of a typewriter is unmistakable. It resonates in a room, timelessly, through doors, into the world. The sounds dominated my skull entirely. I began not to think about but to hear how necessary each word was or wasn’t: if I skipped something to avoid typing it for the fiftieth or hundredth time, and then when I read it, it sounded fine, I would never look back.

I also had a secret, immutable rule. If I ever mistyped a word— horse for house, ward for word, vary for very, or find for fine—I would have to keep it. It was a pact I made with myself, to trust my unconscious, that what seemed to be an error was actually a sign. Occasionally I would accidentally place my fingers on the keys incorrectly and type an unpronounceable word or string of gibberish, which I would then have to try to decipher.

The poems changed, becoming more focused. There are at least fifty and up to several hundred typewritten versions of each of those poems in boxes somewhere. It was when I came at last upon very simple poems, short ones by Vasko Popa, by the Greek poets Yannis Ritsos and C. P. Cavafy, and by the Poles Wisława Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, that I started to see the possibilities of a simple, clear narrative that allowed for both worldly and dreamlike events. I wrote that way for a while, imagining a reader, and being as deliberate as possible. I was also writing for myself, to find out what I would say. I was like a child, finally hearing the stories I had wanted all along.

The combination of gathering lines constantly by hand and returning to them to see what emerged was both elongated and focused by using the typewriter. Plus it was just fun to pound the keys hard and hear the satisfying clacking sound. I was, at last, working.

 

An excerpt from Story of a Poem: A Memoir, forthcoming from Unnamed Press this April.

Matthew Zapruder is the author of five collections of poetry, including Come On All You Ghosts and Father’s Day, as well as Why Poetry, a book of prose. In 2000, he cofounded Verse Press, now known as Wave Books, where he is editor at large and edits contemporary poetry, prose, and translations.