Jeffrey C. Alfier, Dec. '10s real life, underappreciated poet thread

We've had a ex-hippie metamemoirist. A New Jersey bred novelist. A British linguist. And a hardcore environmentalist/bonobo expert in the past. And we embraced them all. This time, we've got ourselves a southwest poet, Jeffrey C. Alfier, author of Offloading the Wounded: Poems, that the incomparable dchaikin ("Dan") brought to our attention with his fine review. Thank you, Dan!

Dan will be hosting our discussion with Jeff beginning December 7th. So please mark the date. Don't miss it. Do be there.

http://www.librarything.com/profile/southwestpoet

Enrique, thanks so much for setting this thread up.

Some quick info to prep:

Dec 7 is the day of the Pearl Harbor attack…but I didn’t realize that when setting this up. Although Jeff is a veteran and his father is WWII veteran, this is just a coincidence.
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Here is Jeff's bio:

Jeffrey Alfier is a Pushcart nominee, and in 2006 he received honorable mention for the Rachel Sherwood Poetry Prize. In 2005 he won first place awards from the Redrock Writer’s Guild of Utah and the Arizona State Poetry Society. He holds an MA in Humanities from California State University at Dominguez Hills. He is an Air Force veteran with 27-plus years of officer and enlisted service. He has also worked as a functional analyst with Science Applications International Corporation, and once taught history as an adjunct faculty member with City College of Chicago’s European Division. His publication credits include Birmingham Poetry Review, Copper Nickel, Crab Orchard Review, The Cape Rock, Chiron Review, Concho River Review, Connecticut River Review, Crannog (UK), Georgetown Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, Los Angeles Review, Pacific Review, Permafrost, Post Road (forthcoming), Rhino, Southwestern American Literature, Texas Review, and War Literature and the Arts. His chapbooks are Strangers Within the Gate (2005), and Offloading the Wounded (2010), both available from The Moon Publishing and Printing, Ft. Wayne, Indiana. His third chapbook, Before the Troubadour Exits, is forthcoming this Winter, from Kindred Spirit Press.

What this doesn’t say is Jeff is co-editor of The San Pedro River Review, a bi-annual poetry review which he co-founded in 2009, shortly after his retirement. The fourth issue, this fall, was the largest at about 76 pages with close to 70 contributors.

Also, it doesn’t say that Jeff is a poetry addict of the inspirational kind who used to scan poems while in meetings.

Helpful links:
- For more info on Jeff, with a couple poems, see my recent review of Offloading the Wounded: http://www.librarything.com/review/64774324
- Home page of the San Pedro River Review: http://www.sprreview.com
- The LT serial page for the San Pedro River Review: http://www.librarything.com/series/San+Pedro+River+Review
- Jeff's LT Author page: http://www.librarything.com/author/alfierjeffreyc

I may add some more links later.

Excellent stuff D.

3> Excellent indeed, D.!

A welcome change, I'd say. One gets tired of all the prosaic types.

from dictionary.com

pro·sa·ic
   /proʊˈzeɪɪk/ Show Spelledproh-zey-ik Show IPA

–adjective

1. commonplace or dull; matter-of-fact or unimaginative: a prosaic mind.

2. of or having the character or form of prose rather than poetry.

A tough word on you novel writers...

Jeff just received a 2010 Pushcart Prize nomination from the Dallas Poets Community. Congratulations and good luck to him!

The poem, titled Nightclub Singer, Il Tazza Blu Café; Carcassonne, France can be found on facebook, but I'm not sure that anyone here can view it. Try this link: http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/notes/jeffrey-alfier/poem-nominated-for-a-20...

Maybe Jeff can e-mail you a copy, Daniel. Or post it himself. I'd like to read it.

Peter - Jeff explained me that he doesn't want to post this poem in an open online forum like this until after it's published in the next issue of Illya's Honey, the Dallas Poets Community journal. This is out of respect for the group that initially accepted the poem.

If you're interested : http://www.dallaspoets.org/A55656/DPC.nsf

Just posting a reminder - we will start December 7, Tuesday.

So be there and support the thread!

7> I was able to access the poem. I think anyone with an FB account can.

We're less than 48 hours away from meeting this wonderful poet, Jeffrey Alfier.

Thanks again Dan for setting this up for us!

>12 absurdeist: how do we find it?

Hi Jeff,

I’ll make an attempt to kick this off. First off thank you coming over here to LibraryThing and taking to time to do this author chat with us. You are our first poet in our string of chats here at Le Salon Litteraire du Peuple pour le Peuple. So, we’re excited, if I can speak for everyone. Certainly, I’m excited.

As a first question, I’d like to know about your background as a poet. What was it that started and motivated your interest in reading and writing poetry?

Thank you, everyone, for your interest. I first took serious interest in poetry around the end of 1996 after I'd read several poems by the British 'trench poets' of World War One. Before poets like Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg, etc., I had little concept of the imagistic power of human language. In the case of those writers, it was the power to literarily and eloquently express horror and human emotion. From that time forward, I began writing poetry, though it took about five years to get accepted in any credible publications; I think I got 100 rejections out of 100 submissions made to print journals between 1997 and 1998. I really found my voice around late 2002, and that is when I began to get published. I had broadened my reading of poetry, and my evolving influences were Richard Hugo, Walt McDonald, and Jane Kenyon. Through reading their works and essays, they taught me how to corral language into concise imagery.

Welcome Jeff, and thanks for being here.

"I really found my voice around late 2002,... "

I'm always so intrigued by the idea of "finding one's voice." Can you chart that experience a bit more for us?

16> It's great having you here!

Even your post is poetry: to corral language into concise imagery. Love it.

A lot of us have read your poems that Dan copied in his review and linked for us. Looking forward to reading some more!

what about form? would you say that you have all the forms in your arsenal? i admire most the masters of form: Hardy, Frost, Auden, Thomas (Dylan & R.S.) just to name a few. Frost said that 'free verse' was playing tennis minus the net. i tend to agree.

Welcome, Jeff, from an alumnus of this thread: a writer, not a poet, but I cut my teeth, so to speak, with the Berkeley Poets and Writers Coop, back in the day.

For me, it was hard at times to keep up my morale, as it might well be for any poet or writer when no one knows who you are and your scribbles can seem meaningless or, lacking an audience, futile. Once, I found affinity groups helpful. They softened the edges of alienation, and now and then the participants even had something helpful to say about a story I might be working on. Did you have need of a similar support network? Do you now? If not and you once did, at what point did you leave it behind?

Jeff, It is terrific having you here! I've been looking forward to it.

#16 Your answer is fascinating to me in several ways. I shouldn't be surprised that these WWI poets lie somewhere near the early stages of your inspiration. I've come across Sassoon before, but not the others. And, as for the later "influences" I've come across Walt McDonald through your recommendations and your poetry review, the San Pedro River Review. I just spent a little time looking up Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Richard Hugo & Jane Kenyon - and reading a few poems, which was quite invigorating. Also, I'm fascinated that you started a serious interest in poetry in late 1996 - definitely not a childhood or young man's pursuit for you. There's a few other questions here (I'm very interested hearing more about finding your voice), so I'll save mine for later.

I love those three war poets. Do you know the Restoration trilogy by Pat Barker? edit -- not Restoration - Regeneration!

I'm also intrigued about finding your voice, how you know you have (a question I am curious about myself - maybe that tells me I haven't!). Also by how you know when you are ready to try to publish something.

Yes; I began in very bad imitation of certain early 20th-century European Surrealists and exile poets. Well, that didn't 'translate' well to my emerging style. But as I began to read more and more of the poets I liked, there evolved an unwittingly influence that began to shape my poems, both in voice and style, and very often in topic. Ted Kooser's advice is aphoristic: read a hundred poems for every poem you want to write yourself.

Thank you very much, Enrique. I enjoy being a part of this discussion.

The form I most often use is syallabic -- each line having the same number of syllables; in my case, it is usually 10 per line. However, I think what is more important is what the poem says -- its use of negative capability, imagistic power through metaphoric language, flow, and good line breaks (I tend to avoid breaking lines with definite or indefinite articles, and prepositions).

Thank you, for it is indeed good to be back. I think the support is good, though it is often subtle, and people don't express it much. The thought of laboring in obscurity is often daunting, so I go back to the near atavistic self-appeal to write verse; that is, something inside us compels us to write. I have a fellow poet I share my work with, and she is great for a sanity check to keep me from venturing into the abyss of proseyness, as it were. Currently I am not a member of any group or support network; I guess the closest thing is gaining the appreciation of a good audience - - such as the kind folks in this LT discussion group. It is also good to read at book or journal issue launch parties, for the audiences are more appreciative than at open mics; I often come away from the latter asking myself what the use was of reading to people who react to poetry with walleyed stares.

Thank you, Dan. Yes, I came to peotry rather late in life (age 42), though there were vague foreshadowings prior to 1996.

I have indeed heard of that trilogy -- I think the journal 'War, Literature and the Arts' has an article on it. I think you know you have your voice once you write something that 1. You like; 2. Is accepted for publication. That is, it's a two-step affirmation. But what happens over the long run is that you begin to trust your instincts, so that even if a poem hasn't been accepted for publication you know it's a good one; it will just take time for it to get publichsed. This year I was fortunate enough to have two poems accepted that I wrote back in 2007. Interestingly enough, one was about a coyote, the other about a wolf. But let me add that there is more to it than these items: sometimes our writing voices evolve, and or split into more than one. That occurs when you try out different writing styles.

Jeff, a suggestion in aid of clarity: add the message number you're responding to. For example:

18. Thank you very much, Enrique. I enjoy being a part of this discussion.

21. Thank you, Dan. Yes, I came to peotry rather late in life (age 42), though there were vague foreshadowings prior to 1996.

Jeff,

I'm curious where your poems come from. Do you have something(s) sort of waiting to come out, or do get inspiration from certain kinds of things? And, if the later, where have you found your inspiration? Has it changed over time?

re post 25 - negative capability...I barely know what I'm talking about here...is that really something to strive for and to use, or is it just something that is maybe appropriate here or there - I mean specifically for you. In a sense I can see that as almost a side-effect of poetry, as something is approached but there is a gap between what the words are saying and the meaning, which perhaps can't be put into words. Perhaps meaning isn't the right word. But, anyway, it hadn't occurred to poets may have this in mind, negative capability, as some kind of goal.

Cheers,
d

29: Thanks, copyedit52 -- that makes sense.

30: As for where my poems come from, I guess I could summarize it by saying that they come from my surroundings, both physical and imagined. In the aggregate, my poems are at best semi-autobiographical, though some are biographical, like poems I wrote about my daughter's experiences in Iraq, or my own in the Air Force, or my dad's experiences in World War II. In general, I get my 'triggers' from such diverse places as farmers fields I've walked in, city alleys I've found myself down, small towns in deserts, in mine shafts, in wars and times between wars, but also in the homes of family and friends; that is, the possibilities are endless, and again, some are strictly imagined, while others I've been a physical and emotional part of. I have even found triggers in books, or in a short story that's incited my imagination. I once wrote a poem triggered by something a man wrote in a travelogue about seeing a vulture eating something on the side of a desert road; in my poem the desert was there – as in a good many of my poems – but the bird was a Northern Harrier, and I re-inscribed its circumstances differently. Journal and newspaper articles are also pregnant with possibilities. And I continue to observe and overhear people in cafes and bars, as well the environments of those places. The imagination is a hell of a democracy. The dispossessed and the beautifully marginal are often my subjects.

As for changes over time, I have somewhat gotten away from writing Southwest regionalist poems and moved on to northern US cities, and the West coast, particularly port towns and shipyards. I have also been writing a lot of poems set in nightclubs and bars. I find such places and spaces quite fertile grounds for poems. Yet recently I’ve got back a bit to the Southwest and its culture.

In ref. to # 25 and negative capability, it is something I always strive for, though poems can succeed through other means. For me, negative capability is inscribing uncertainty, obscurity, or doubt without any desperate reaching, or needing resolutions derived from reasoning processes.In the course writing, I like being indirect in my poems, allowing for elements such as pathos, irony, insinuation, nuance, allusion. Good poems are created by tension and take their strength from what is left out of them; never try to explain everything. As poet Thomas Sayers Ellis said, “The sentence is the enemy of the line.” There is great value in subtext, which gives poems a needed subtlety, if not a necessary ambiguity.

Iambic Monometer, not many serious poems of this stripe but here's one of them:

Thus I
Pass by,
And die:
As one
Unknown
And gone.
I'm made
A shade
And laid
I'th' grave:
There have
My cave
Where tell
I dwell
Farewell.

- UPON HIS DEPARTURE HENCE, Robert Herrick

IM is more often used in refrain lines - especially in poems of other meters:

'Mid pathless deserts I groan and grieve;
In weariest solitudes I leave
My track;
Bemoaning the fate that has christened me,
In spite of my whiskered dignity,
A Yak!

O happy child with the epithet
Of Abe or Ike or Eliphalet,
Or Jack,
You little wot of the blush of shame
That dyes my cheek when I hear the name
Of Yak!

- Alack the Yak, Burges Johnson

#33 Porius, entertaining, but no clue what this was in reference to. Can you help the poetically clueless?

I've just looked up iambic and monometer in this glossary of poetic terms (http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/glossary_of_poetic_terms.htm ) So, I'm an expert now *:)*, but still don't see the connection.

#32 Jeff, fascinating stuff. I've noticed a military theme through many of your poems, but not in combat and war experience sense, more as an observer or even from the distance. Could you tells us a little about how and in what way the military plays a roll in your poetry (or how it doesn't play a roll - maybe I've overstated this)?

#32 negative capability etc.

I need to process all that. A lot to think on here. I can see this and I'm trying to place in a context of what a poem is reaching for, what it's trying to do. Maybe this is the wrong context, or overly limited. Anyway, no question, just pondering.

34, doesn't have a direct connection, I simply wanted to get a discussion started. I will keep it up if the rest of you don't mind. I'd like to get SWP's opinion on the nuts and bolts of poetry.

Porius - apologies.(some days I probably shouldn't post)

Not necessary D., it was a fair question. The nuts and bolts have always fascinated me. I love spondees and caesuras (male and female) and all that sort of thing. I admire most the virtuosos like Hardy & Auden et al. As I am not so crazy about the formlessness of much modern poetry. I can abide some of Ferlighettis' pyro-technicks but have little patience for the tennis without the nett poets. Poets like Yeats, Thomas (Dylan & R.S.) slaved diligently over their verse. Just about anyone can scribble that modern stuff. Just my opinion. I am not interested in raining on anyone's parade.

The recognizable Iambic pentameter:

The learned reflect on what before they knew:
Careless of censure, nor too fond of fame;
Still pleased to praise, yet not afraid to blame,
Averse alike to flatter or offend,
Not free from from faults, nor yet too vain to mend.

CRITICISM, Alexander Pope

Trochaic -The trochaic foot contains 2 syllables. The first is long or stressed; the second short or unstressed. Single words illustrating it are armor, helmet, useful, missile, letter. Because of the lightness of the rhythm which the trochaic meter affects, it is often called the Tripping Measure.

Trochaic dimeter:
The first, third, and fifth, and seventh lines of the following poem are trochaic dimeter; the remaining lines are various metrical length:

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

#32: Dan, in the current issue of SPRR, check out the poem by John Kippen; it's a great example of negative capability.

#34: For me, it comes down to interesting language developed in a sequential story, a good use of metaphors and similes, negative capability where appropriate, as well as a musical sense of language. Not all of these need to be present, but if one is going to write in non-metaphorical narrative, for example, then it should be a story that grabs the reader's attention, holding it until the end. Although I don't summarily dismiss any category of poetry, I do have a hard time with dry, 'so what?' narrative, overloaded verbal circuits, and topics I'd categorize as the poetic adjunct to Christian Lander's NY Times bestseller, 'Stuff White People Like.' What I mean by that is not the topics per se, but how blandly they’re written about, especially when they give the impression that someone is being showy: ‘I’ve-climbed-a-mountaintop-you-haven’t-and-I-know esoteric-secrets-from-guys-in-long-beards-and-robes-who-cook-cool-food-and-know-martial arts’ kind of shit. In sum, I'm like Ted Kooser: I don't care about categories and schools of poetry that much; what's important is whether you like the damned poem or not. I mean, my own poetry makes use of the Objectivist and Imagistic schools, but I've long forgotten, and ceased to care about, such earlier perceptions, and I'm certainly not a purist when it comes to such things.

#40 Jeff - I remember the Kippen poem, which is fantastic (no clue what the form is). I'd post here, but there's that copyright problem. To me it was a sketch; it left an impression that needed a lot of filling in and the filling in, which could be done in many ways, always pointed to things that struck a nerve. The cumulative effect was much larger than the poem - a few tiny black marks on paper create a whole emotional atmosphere that hangs around in the memory.

But negative capability should leave us "without any desperate reaching, or needing resolutions derived from reasoning processes." Does it do that? I keep wavering on what this actually means. Part of me thinks, "I really want to understand this poem, and see exactly what poet is seeing," which I take to mean I want a resolution. But, I think I might be confusing was is meant here. I may want a resolution of what is behind the poem...and not of the poem itself, if that makes sense.

A question for anyone, not just Jeff* - I interested in how critical you think the form is to the poem, versus say the affect. Can you classify that somehow - the "how" part? I think Jeff kind of answers this when he says "what's important is whether you like the damned poem or not."

*I hope this is OK here. We can split this out to another thread.

Jeff,

Been following the conversation closely. I know, as Dan mentions above, there's copyright problems with reposting some of your poetry selections; however, are there some more poems of yours that perhaps copyright might not apply and that could be posted here for our enjoyment and discussion?

I think I can safely PM the Kippen poem to anyone who wants. Let me know.

I'd like it, Dan, please.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O8GFtspk9U&feature=relatedI shall form you no more forms.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2PyeXRwhCE&feature=related
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jyb-dlVrrz4&feature=related

Dan, would you please PM the poem to me? Thanks in advance.

43> I can live with or without strict form. All poetry has some form to it, even so-called "free verse". I've no clue to the nuts and bolts of form, but I think I know a good poem when I read it; when it evokes something inside me -- a feeling, a remembrance -- that I may not recognize right off nor have the words to express myself. In the few poems I've read of Jeff's, I've experienced just that.

could you pm me as well please. thankee kindly.

I'd appreciate a pm with the poem too please.

I like "the sentence is the enemy of the line".

"Negative capability" I have been mixing up a bit with "chameleon poet" for 12 months or so, for a very understandable reason, or to include the idea of poem as empathy (with less of the author present), and now I see it is different and as you say.

Re: Negative capability

Keats' theory of "negative capability" was expressed in his letter to his brother dated Sunday, 21 December 1817:

"I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, on various subjects; several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason... "

yes I looked it up too -- and as I understand it thats the total of his theory on that.

#44. Yes, I'll inscribe a few here. Thank you for asking to see a few. These are older, or have otherwise appeared in print at various stages along the way:

The Desert Elk

In time, this ceaseless wind will brush aside
the vulgar charm of exhausted huntsmen.
It sweeps dunes like breath on votive candles

to disinter a skeleton intact,
its limber touch laying bare the fragments,
leaving unharmed a larkspur’s fringed petals.

Light was body, seized in her own bloodbeat
or touched like birthwater warming her sides
for gleaming mouths of calves. When it began

what she knew ranged far beyond petroglyphs
wrought in stone to mute gods, a shaman’s wail.
When snowdrifts thawed into streams, whose eyes could

hers implore: I followed open water,
sagebrush, daylight fading cold and remote,
the bullet, by now, refusing return.

Lap Dancer

This is no place you drop by on a whim.
I need these lights flashing lurid spectrums
to forgive every lie malt liquor can’t.

I won’t wait for the beat to get smoother;
'Rough Boy’s' close as anything ZZ Top
ever came to making a slow dance song.

At her approach my focus narrows quick
as if I hear glass shattering at night.
I watch hips undulate, and swallow hard.

I let her dark skin become the tripwire
that sparks nerves burning up and down my spine.
I’ll watch the light pass through her when she leaves.

The Freightyard Prophet

Mojave’s desert hills surge before him
as if storm-beaten seas froze to granite.
Shadows wilt like men in funhouse mirrors.
The white lines of back roads burn through his sleep.

Haunting shit-kicker bars in flyspeck towns,
yellow skin means his liver’s losing ground.
Snorting hits of speed off a whore’s switchblade,
he pontificates to fellow wastrels:

‘Drive with expired tags but stay off the grid.’
‘Find weed so righteous that God would smoke it.’
‘Pray gas pumps out here ain’t dry as tombstones.’
‘Hide out in a mirage if you have to.’

Life reaches an impasse that wears his name.
He hops a Union Pacific grainer
trundling through open plateaus of sandstone
where brakemen glare, latch trains to hard silence.

Your First Dream Was an Island
to Sandy, who kept the faith

Sixteen hours behind you, in the dim
wash of a Tucson quarter moon,
I’d slept through your open-water dive
as you descended Oshima Island’s
placid surf, down three fathoms
to seabed urchins, anemones, lionfish.
When you surfaced in an exigence,
oxygen unspooled from your lungs.
A rescuer tried to breathe your life back,
the last syllables of your shouted name
scoring through camellia, lilium, dianthus.

When our daughter phoned to tell me
your life gave out, I lost faith in light.
But something inside screamed for God
to gavel clean my panic, turn back the cold
that stung my hands with sudden need to wipe
fog from inside your breath-frosted diver’s
mask, to let me search your eyes, that minus
my reflection, rose burdenless over the sea.

My Grandson Takes Leave of Arizona

That unset day of parting hit the calendar
like a thief. Long before your father packed
your things to move you both back East, our days
ran in green hunger for tales of summer trees.
It had been a month since we’d laughed
as we ran through that orchard in Willcox,
plucking bright apples in the bone-dust light
of desert air – our small act of defiance.
Afterward, we hit our favorite café for apple
pancakes you always loved the sight of,
but barely touched. When we told the aged
waitress it was our last time there, her eyes
went heavy with our names.

Today shifting clouds urge the slant of sun
through windows of the house we lived in
for a year, where I’d wake you each morning
for school, or Saturday cartoons, your room
stinking with week-old socks and damp
pool towels I’d asked you time and again
to pick up. Now the house, its windows up
to air it out for buyers, can only smell of trees.

To a Brother Who Asked What Grieving is Like

You take a day-long summer drive down
a silken coastal road, wanton with sunlight.
Reaching your destination, you realize
that no longer lives the chance for an inviting
stroll past scarlet tanagers flocking sea pines
at the foot of the lighthouse you always took
her to. The day is transfigured to ambling
down streets of some cold city you thought
you’d long forsaken. Through a wind-torn
alley your footfalls echo in a deserted plaza
where you catch a human likeness mirrored
in a café window, a cellphone held to his ear,
listening forever to the same missed call.

Redondo Littoral

On the beach, the homeless man sleeps
on his right side in overalls so gray
and out of season he could have been cast
from some icy-winded port, or warehouse
in a stockyard up north, making you wonder
who the patron saint of such aliens may be.

Above him, a formation of pelicans
is echeloned west over the breakers
where one of their own, dredged ashore,
twists in decay of wing and bone.

In a broad expanse of unbrokenly lit sky,
the pelicans, so flawless, seem suspended
like a mobile in a dream, or a prayer
undiminished at the height of summer.

Thank you for those, Jeff! Old or not, they're quite good. I've been reading Denis Johnson's, Jesus' Son and I'd say your narrator of "The Freightyard Prophet" knows Johnson's characters (or vice versa). There's that, not sure what to name it, but that haunted, desolate quality in that piece that really resonates with me. Ditto for "To a Brother Who Asked What Grieving is Like".

How long does it take for these poems to find their way onto the page, and how many revisions do you typically find yourself making before you know you've got a finished, excised of extraneous fat, poem?

and I guess a related question while I'm thinking about it ... where do the seeds of your poems spring from? Do you get an image in your mind first, and then tie the image into the idea and then just riff off from there; or is it the reverse? Do you find that the images, once you have one, just start coming to you in waves once you get writing and conceptualizing? ... something else altogether?

Jeffrey, I just read your profile. It's funny how male poets seem to gravitate to the manly jobs, physical work, the stuff that connects you to yourself and the world around you. Poetry from an armchair, while there have been a few successful practitioners, doesn't seem to have that animal spirit and appreciation for our predicament. I think arrogance and snobbishness are bred indoors. People who live and work outdoors don't seem to have the time for such tomfoolery as self-importance.

Somehow I had it in my mind you were from the Dallas Metroplex in Texas, and I had a few questions based on that, but the San Pedro River Review sounds like a southern California operation.

Thanks Jeff, wonderful stuff. I really enjoy reading them (some I recognize, some from this past year.)

"Life reaches an impasse that wears his name." - I feel that way myself lately (but without anything to pontificate about).

Jeff, I was reading an essay on Sylvia Plath this morning (It's from a 1994 issue of The Texas Review....don't ask why I'm reading this.) and it discusses the contradiction between writing a well-crafted poem and one "whose parts have an organic relationship to each other." To quote: "If a poem is consciously wrought, the book* argues, it cannot also be organic; if its parts have grown naturally from one another, then it cannot be crafted."

So, the question this inspired and which I'll put to you: What do you think constitutes your perfect poem?

*refers to Sylvia Plath's collection, The Colossus.

#55. Thank you so very much, Enrique. When you say, "that haunted, desolate quality," you know teh very heart of not only these poems, but so many that I write.

I would say that I complete most of my poems over a two- to-three day period, once I have the initial notes written. I start out by writing everything down as if I were recording the dryest of narratives. Then I re-work the language into poetry -- trimming and honing words and images. Still, I'll often revise well after the poem's been written, and sometimes even after it's been published. As for the number of revisions to cut the fat, I would say, on the average, that I hone the language of the inital draft about 5 to 10 times before I'm satisfied.

#56: It's a combination of things, but mainly the image comes into my mind concurrently with a triggering line; that is, the image spurs the spark of language that will evolve into the poem. Sometimes these lines don't immediately result in poems, and they incubate for quite some time in the notebook I carry around with me (in my back pocket as I write this). They await their context. Sometimes the lines could apply to various potential poems. For instance, I have a line in my notebook that goes, "soft as the breath of vipers," that I haven't used yet. That could apply to many things, from a dying comrade to a lap dancer.

#57: Richard Hugo once said that the perfect job for a poet would be to work in a warehouse where he moves carts from one side of the warehouse to the other. At first I thought he meant a simple employment that would allow teh poet maximum luxury time to write, undisturbed as he would be by, say, a large office in a corporation. But I believe he refers to the fact that physical labor aids thinking. Many times when I'm writing a poem I take a break and do something physical, whether it's pushups or cleaning dishes. I can't explain it, but there seems a relationship between physical labor and the poetry-infused sides of our brains. Right now I am retired, but it feels good to even pull weeds.

I do agree that poets who labor can write quite visceral, believable verse. It's not an aphorism that's always true, but perhaps just a proverb.

I have read my poetry with the Dallas Poets Community, but never lived there. San Pedro River Review is named after the ancient river that runs from Mexico up into Arizona. I do live a few miles from San Pedro, California, and many people think SPRR refers to that area (I began the journal in Tucson, Arizona, before moving out here).

#58: You are most welcome, Dan. I am very grateful to you for setting up the LT discussion, and to the participants here.

#59: Plath, like Ann Sexton, is a captivating personality for me, so I understand why you were reading her. In the essay you read, Plath may have been differentiating between a poem that is a forced construction, through anticipatory craftsmanship, and one that is formed naturally. Perhaps I got it wrong on what she means, but nevertheless I also believe that good poem will have parts that relate to other parts within the poem, even as it relates to the wider world (negative capability). In a good poem, the ending often reflects back to something said in the first part of the poem, though it doesn't always have to be that way.

But a perfect poem -- or lets say one that goes as far as it can in being perfect -- will have a sense of negative capability and make good use of metaphoric language; that is, it captivates the reader. For example, tonight I am attending an open mic in El Segundo, and I decided rather than read my own owrk I'm going to read poems by Vietnam vet and Pulitzer Prize winner, Yusef Komunyakka. In one of his poems the lines read, "Viet Cong / move under our eyelids, / lords over loneliness / winding like coral vine through / sandalwood & lotus, / inside our lowered heads...' For me, that is exemplary of what approaches a perfect poem.

Just a quick notice (from the evil blackberry), I'm going to close this conversation soon. I would have done by now, this evening, but there have been some distractions. Just letting everyone know so we don't post another round of questions.

Thanks Jeffrey it has been very interesting, I enjoyed your poems and the discussion. Thanks Dan and Enrique too.

Thanks Jeffrey and best wishes. I hope you will visit again.

This has been an an enjoyable and fascinating conversation in many ways. But, alas, it's time to wrap-it up.

Jeff, thanks so much for spending time with us here and discussing your work and ideas about poetry. (I will have negative capability in mind in my future poetry reading.) Best of luck to you with your upcoming book, with the San Pedro River Review and with your future writing. Certainly, I'm looking forward to that book.

To everyone else, thanks for joining in and making this a great conversation. Enrique - thanks for help setting this up.

Cheers all.

ps - This is the "official" end and Jeff won't be making any further contributions (as far as I know). But, feel free to post any last thoughts.

#64 - Jeff, thanks. Note that the essay was on Plath, not by her. The essay is Reconstructed Vase: Sylvia Plath and New Critical Aestetics by Vicki Graham, published by The Texas Review, 1994, no. 1&2.

Excellent thread Dan!

Thanks Jeff for putting yourself and your work out there for us. And please feel free, when you've got another chap book of poems coming out or anything of yours you'd like to make this audience aware of in the future, to do so here on your thread. You're welcome here in the salon anytime.