Notes
53 NOTES If these poems work, they work best when they move the way the mind does. As people do when they’re trying to figure out their day or plan a trip or decide what to have for dinner, I tend to start with a small thought, watch it snowball into something beyond itself, and, after a couple of minutes , do my best to bring everything together and make something that’ll stand on its own. Over the years, I’ve tried to learn as much as I can from the masters: Dante, Whitman, and especially Shakespeare. But my workshop would be a lot lonelier without the presence of innumerable others, at least some of whom I’d like to thank here. “The Voice in the Other Room” The reference to Cole Porter and the images that follow it are from the best essay I’ve ever read on repetition in poetry, which is by Marianne Boruch; it’s called “Poetry’s Over and Over” and appears in In the Blue Pharmacy: Essays on Poetry and Other Transformations. “Roy G. Biv” I wanted to convey the chewy variety of American poetry here, so I raided the file of blurbs I’ve written for poetry books in recent years. Many of the images in this poem come from lines of well-deserved praise I wrote earlier for these poets and their collections: Steve Fellner, Blind Date with Cavafy; Daniel Borzutzky, The Ecstasy of Capitulation; Mark Kraushaar, Falling Brick Kills Local Man; Richard Bausch, These Extremes: Poems and Prose; and Alan Michael Parker, Elephants & Butterflies. “Senior Coffee” In the course of a 4,000-mile train trip from St. Petersburg to Beijing, I had all the Russian greats with me (in an e-reader, of course), but along the way, I discovered Varlam Shalamov, whose Kolyma Tales recount almost photographically his years in the gulag. The list of things that step easily into poetry and make themselves at home there is based on a similar list in the best story in this collection, “Cherry Brandy,” which imagines the final days of the poet Mandelstam as he lies dying in a prison camp, and the phrase “not for poetry but through poetry” is Shalamov’s as well. 54 “Siberia” Shalamov appears again in this poem; the sentences quoted here are from his memoir The Fourth Vologda. Shalamov’s output was small, and his works are not easy to come by, but they’re worth the search. Every sentence of his reads as though he worked it by hand, sighted down its length to make sure it was straight, and polished it until it was as perfect as anything can be on this earth. ...
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