Brian Brodeur has posted my responses to his questionnaire for my poem "Shall Be Taught to Speak" at the "How a Poem Happens" blog.

I'd call this a one-draft poem. I might have--I can't say for sure, though it's typical for me--thought about the poem for a few weeks before I sat down to the first draft. I can't say that I had -- or have -- a single eureka moment and then went to writing. I usually mull a thought for a few days or weeks. If it stays and still seems interesting, then I start writing, though sometimes I won't set pen to paper until I have a good idea of the poem's arc. During that thinking time, you could say I'm drafting the poem already.

I hope you enjoy it...

Natasha Trethewey discussed her motivations for writing about history and social justice on February 3 in Atlanta, and the video is now up, including a discussion of one of my own poems (around the 35-minute mark).

Wendy S. Walters is guest-blogging on Ruth Ellen Kocher's channel About A Word, starting with an intriguing entry that reminds me again (as if I need to be reminded), why I'm drawn back to Wendy's work again and again.

Lately I spend a lot of time trying to locate the geography of the work. I believe the writing is someplace. While always true, facts of location are always temporary. And while current events seem to confirm this point for me over and over, somehow I still go out to try and find the line. Whether this is a problem with poetry or a problem with me matters less, I think, than the mistake of not feeling how much wildness is naturally occurring wherever it is the search for the poem takes me.

I should have tattooed on me somewhere a line from Wendy's Birds of Los Angeles: "I am addicted to places..."

Everything's not in ink just yet, but I've got a basic verbal arrangement to bring out my companion to/extension of A Murmuration of Starlings maybe next year.

The book is called Persons Unknown, and it will gather recent poems you may have seen (or may yet see) in The Cincinnati Review, The Southern Review (Summer 2009 & Fall 2009), Shenandoah, Blackbird, and the new Northwest Review, as well as some other material that has yet to be journalized.

It's designed to fit inside A Murmuration of Starlings, with its two sections to be wrapped around "Tuck," the central poem in Murmuration. Basically, this book collects the material I would have put in the place of "Tuck" if I hadn't placed Murmuration and had been working on it for the last two years.

This is more than a little bit of a relief, though now I'm addressing the more mechanical aspects of getting the manuscript ready for publication, including, of course, the copyediting, but more harrowing, the selection of possible cover images and the completion of the marketing questionnaire, which asks, among other things, for one to describe "Key Customer Features & Benefits," in the face of which I am momentarily paralyzed, aphasic.

That moment, in which the more artisinal and spiritual relationship to the work has to harmonize with the language and concern of capital and production is an interesting one that actually expands my knowledge of my own work. When I am asked to "touch on the basic points in simple language" or to "provide a synopsis of your book as you would describe it to a colleague who is unfamiliar with you or your work," I have a new challenge, which forgets both the more minute and technical aspects I obsess over daily and the larger poetic/social/personal commitments that keep me at the writing table. I'm projected into a very different, alien space, in which I realize quickly I don't quite have the right vocabulary to reach someone who may not already be disposed to read this material, and that I have to develop that vocabulary.

I was in a sophomore literature classroom at the University of Wyoming yesterday, thanks to the curiosity and generosity of Harvey Hix (H. L. Hix), and there I dealt with that same problem, how to discuss some complex artistic issues and personal questions with an audience comprised primarily of non-specialists who also don't yet have a large body of extensible knowledge, and there I had one of those ecstatic moments when I'm doing something and also watching myself do something, saying something and also listening to myself saying something --- and I was hyperaware of those moments when I edged into a more intellectual vocabulary (in which I required by also reveled in it), and the moments when I compensated by swinging back into contemporary vernacular. It was a two-state solution: in the absence of a real synthetic solution, I present the poles of the dialectic.

I don't know if this is possible in the marketing questionnaire or the jacket copy, but I'm oscillating, and thinking a bit jealously about those authors I have met who seem particularly adept at discussing their work in more direct or non-academic terms, and I need to get there, but I don't live in that neighborhood. Or I have to find a way to be more bi-locational, bi-coastal, bi-polar.

All this, of course, in the middle of going through the address book and e-mail box to discover information of possible reviewers or people who could blurb the book or consider adopting it for courses --- which basically boils one's life and contacts down to a 10-page document, providing another goad for "getting out more," and the like.

I am grateful for ideas, advice, &c., anyone has. Meanwhile, put a pin in your calendar for November 2010 and put this title on your Christmas list: Persons Unknown.