The Centrifugal Eye - August 2010

Erik Richardson: I think I’d have them include a span of green, classroom chalkboard, and chalk, because of the huge part of my life that’s been fueled by teaching from K5 up to college. The third material included would be barn wood. In one way or another, old barns have been like gravity points anchoring the various orbits of my (mis)adventures.

Jessie Carty: The first three materials that came to mind were: cardboard, charcoal, and a glass of water. Although, that seems like three items that could be put together to write with if you wet the charcoal and used the cardboard as your paper. Those three items, however, do show up in my book, and this question just made me realize how subtle even the little items in a poem (or a book of poems) can be, even to the author.

Ted Jean: Pebble, feather, nail; my work usually features a human actor in the physical world.

Scott Owens: Dark chocolate, red clay, and a topographical map, because I love dark chocolate, I was born and raised in the red clay regions of SC, NC, and GA, and I spend a lot of time hiking.

Geordie de Boer: A section of flowing stream (see Trout Fishing In America, by Richard Brautigan) — I like Taoism; a psychoanalyst’s couch, because of a tendency to write ‚the inner person‛ of us all; and a coin, because I like to use words that have two sides.

Tom Daley: a) Sand from Wingaersheek Beach in Gloucester, MA — that beach was a place where many of my narratives seem to land, where I learned to dig with my hands, where I learned what it was to develop techniques in building structures and tunnels out of sand. We are all falling into the sea, eventually, as Jimmy Hendrix promised for those whose houses are built on sand. b) Water from a kettle pond — the legacy of glacier melt, the old residues of the ice age, a mineral sweetness. c) Loam from a compost bin — one of my great fascinations is to watch food and yard waste decompose into rich, black dirt. The decay and regeneration give me hope, in a strange way.

Brandon Williams: A flashlight for night reading, a book of Gerald Stern's collected poetry to see the inspiration behind the first poem I ever composed and the pieces that have followed in a sequential order that can hopefully be considered an upward arc, and a lighter, because in retrospect there's no way anything I've written can stand up to the weakest piece in Leaving Another Kingdom.

Gary Lehmann: Funny you should mention this. I’m the curator at the Valentown Museum in Victor, New York, and many of my poems begin with objects I have explored for the museum collection. So the materials I would place with my poems would be the objects that inspired the poems in the first place, such as a funny letter from 1911 between a