About “In the Emergency Room” & “Perfect Summer Day”

1. What was your motivation for writing “In the Emergency Room” & “Perfect Summer Day”?

“In the Emergency Room” came as I was sitting in the ER of a hospital to which my father had been taken. He was in the later stages of dementia and living in a small assisted living facility, but he was delirious this night. Just sitting by his bedside watching the man I no longer know slipping away led me to the poem, which I wrote the first draft of that evening.

“Perfect Summer Day” was written late one afternoon when we still lived in Rochester, New York, with its short summers. This was a day of household chores, one of which was weeding our small backyard vegetable garden. Given my lack of enthusiasm for that job, I was easily distracted by all nature was offering, and this is a snapshot of those moments.

2. What challenges—if any—did you have writing your poems?

The challenge for me with any poem is the editing. I’d rather be on to the next poem rather than spend time revising and improving one I have written. Periodically, I block off time and focus solely on revision. My wife is a fellow poet, and she has mastered the editing skills I lack, so I turn to her for help when I need it, which is often.

3. What is your favourite line—if any—in “In the Emergency Room”?

“a person does not shrink in a hospital bed”.

4. What is your favourite line—if any—in “Perfect Summer Day”?

“my forehead licked by the sun”.

5. What do you want people to walk away with after reading “In the Emergency Room” & “Perfect Summer Day”?

I would hope they would have a sense of the moment in which the events occurred, a sort of remote presence in what transpired and was captured, as best I could, on paper.

Reading

1. What are you currently reading?

Selected Poems: 1950-2012 and Rental House: A Novel by Weike Wang

2. Do you have a favourite book? If so, what is it?

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller (Italo Calvino)

3. What is your favourite poet or author, if any?

Too many to count, but Leonard Cohen is high on the list.

4. Do you gravitate towards reading genres outside the ones you write?

The quality of the language, the author’s use of words. The genre of a work is less important to me than be taken by the writing itself. The best books take me a long time, since I find myself savoring each sentence to the point I want to reread some of them.

Writing

1. Why do you write?

I suppose I imagine I have something to say that others should or might want to hear. I find writing enticing, and at times cathartic. It is how I tilt at the windmills that seem to be going up all around me in the current world. And because they let me express or offer ideas. Ideas can be soothing or they can be weapons, as both Joseph Stalin and Oscar Wilde, for two, clearly understood. *

2. What do you love about being a poet?

That you write what you want or need to with no expectation of financial reward. Like my Zen Buddhism, writing is a practice that I do daily. Often my writing is tucked away never to see the light of day again, but every once in a while…

3. What time of the day do you write, and do you have a writing routine?

I tend to write in the late afternoon now that I am retired. I used to write when I travelled, particularly on airplanes and in hotel rooms, where in the midst of chaos I could actually be alone with my thoughts.

4. Where do you get your ideas from?

I’m not sure I want to know. Mostly, I guess, from experience, often from revisiting events in my life or the lives of others, examining the shadows they left behind.

5. How long does it take you to write your projects?

Some may take minutes. Other poems can take years (not of constant work, obviously). Each poem has its own demands. Sometimes I meet them, sometimes I bend them to my will. The former are the better poems, I suspect.

6. What advice would you give to other authors/writers/poets?

Practice, practice, practice. Find a comfortable closet and lock your inner critic away in there until, perhaps, you come to the final edits. Then listen to the critic and lock him or her away again.

7. What project(s) are you currently working on?

Drafting poems. Two themes which recur and may lead to a collection are (1) discovering who I am as an adoptee who discovered his heritage in his sixties; (2) losing my central vision to Age-Related Macular Degeneration and appreciating a new world and new ways of doing things, a world in which few can know.

* Stalin: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas.”

Wilde: “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.”