It will take thinking about the arc of the work, writing to fill in gaps, knitting together the poems so that they flow organically. This is very, very hard to do. TCE: You don’t shy away from literary references or foreign phrases or brand names in your poems. Any one of these can get a poet into hot water with readers and/or critics. Yet your choices seem deft. How do you decide which references to include? Do you worry at all that a reference (or commercial phrase) might be too obscure? Popular? Esoteric? CB: Ah, you played right into my hands, and those of the poet Tony Hoagland (www.fivepowerspoetry.com), who recommends “exercising the muscle of particularity” by using names of specific places and things for their “sonic appeal.” Some of my choices are deliberate, but most are intuitive. For example, Charlotte thinks she should mention a high fashion shoe on her online dating profile to show how fashion-conscious she is (she isn’t). She’s watched Sex and the City, so she knows Carrie wears Manolo Blahniks, but she can’t remember the name, so she calls them “barfniks.” The poem doesn’t mention Sex and the City, and you don’t need to know anything about Manolo Blahniks to understand that Charlotte is trying to namedrop and failing. Then Charlotte thinks about “keds,” which are more her speed. I want both “barfniks” and “keds” to resonate with the reader, whether she knows the specific brand or not. “Barfniks” should sound like a pair of shoes which are sold, not for comfort or practicality, but because they are both foreign and expensive, in short, a big barf. I asked Tony Hoagland about the danger of choosing a name that may lose its significance in time. Example: Facebook is now so ubiquitous that it has become a verb, whereas Myspace has sunk into obscurity. Tony says that’s a risk worth taking. My view is that a place name should 1. be easily pronounced phonetically by the reader, 2. set off sonic ripples, and 3. connote an abstract concept. For example, Keds are shoes that kids wore (and adults who don’t care if they look like kids). As to “hot water” about using names or products (Chanel No. 5, for example), I’m a lawyer, damn it! I am totally happy to abide by my editor’s policies about using real names, but I absolutely cannot afford to censor my work by worrying about trade-name issues. I’m not infringing Chanel’s trademark because to do that, I’d have to be using their name on a product I was selling in a way that confused customers. That is not applicable to poetry. For an excellent discussion of this issue, see attorney Mark Fowler’s blog.* It’s not that I am uninterested in the legitimate legal issues that affect poets, but the trade name isn’t a major concern. I am presenting a panel at the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in Boston in March of 2013 on the legal issues of defamation and invasion of privacy that involve writing about real people and real situations. TCE: Your poems combine the best attributes of lyric and narrative poetry. Do you also write fiction? And do you compose poems on a computer? What is your process? CB: I haven’t written fiction — yet. But I have just begun a journal now that I’m living at the beach in Connecticut for the winter. It’s an extended meditation triggered by sand and sea. I’m also writing a collection of poems based on legal language. Some titles include: “Attractice Nuisance,” “I Don’t Recall,” and “Why I’ll Never Be a Public Defender.” Perhaps I’ll find a new protagonist for this collection. And with very rare exceptions, I always begin with a pen and paper. That is how the poetic spirit works for me. I don’t sit at a blank computer screen from 8 to 10 a.m. each day. I write when I should be doing something else. Usually, I revise my first draft when I put it onto the computer and continue revising on the computer. I always take my poems to a workshop, either with my poetry group of nine poets, who have been meeting for ten years, or my MFA colleagues. I want to choke poets at open mikes who introduce their poem with, “Well, this is something I just wrote today.” If you just wrote it today, it is not ready to read out loud! I tend to write in quatrains and almost always, my first line is in iambic pentameter. After the poem is on the page, I experiment with different stanza and line lengths. I listen carefully to the meter to see if a different word “sounds” better.
*http://www.rightsofwriters.com/2010/12/can-i-mention-brand-name-products-in-my.html.
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