Lives Brought to Life
Congrats to Loren Graham (Places I Was Dreaming) and Brent Newsom (Love’s Labors) on being named 2016 Oklahoma Book Award Finalists in poetry!
Finalists will be announced at the 27th Annual Oklahoma Book Awards on Saturday, April 9th.
To labor at what we love—whether that is tinkering away at the car in our garage or carrying our first child to life—is a process of concentrated intensity just as it is a painful, lengthy, and arduous journey. To labor, then, implies paradox: the flash-flickering moments of strenuous human effort and the dull understanding that relief is a long road ahead. Brent Newsom’s debut poetry collection Love’s Labors captures such a paradox. In Newsom’s poems, we encounter an intricate growing narrative of the poet’s becoming a father just as others around him lose their own loved ones. Life and death, grief and shame, flare up with equal intensity, just as a complicated consolation slowly cools the senses.
Given this strong debut, readers can hope that Brent Newsom’s future poems will continue to develop more of these individuals (and himself), focusing on the confusing and confounding wonder of the human condition(s).
Read the full review here
Brent Newsom, RealArt DeRidder Art Gallery (108 W. First St., DeRidder, LA)
Tuesday, July 7th at 7:00pm
Public reading & book signing
Brent Newsom, Woody Guthrie Folk Festival (St. Paul’s United Methodist Church, 202 N. Third St., Okemah, OK)
Saturday, July 11th at 10:00am
Featured reader in the Woodie Guthrie Poetry Readings
NIN ANDREWS
I admire this book (Love’s Labors) so much, I don’t know where to start. I can’t quite believe it’s your first collection of poetry. Really? So I am guessing it took you a long time to write?
BRENT NEWSOM
Wow, thanks! That’s quite a compliment. I did spend several years working on the collection: the earliest poems included in the book, some of the Smyrna poems, were drafted in the spring of 2007, and I was still writing new poems in 2010. After that I revised for three years before sending the manuscript to CavanKerry. I was in graduate school most of that time, and an earlier version of the book served as the creative portion of my dissertation, which I completed in 2012.
NA
I wonder if you could say a few words about the evolution of Love’s Labors, and how you developed this rhythm—rotating poems about the birth of your children with other themes: your father, your faith, and the locals. The whole book reads like one long poem.
BN
Initially I envisioned an entire collection of Smyrna poems, some of which dealt with themes of faith and doubt from the beginning. But when my wife became pregnant with our first child, all my creative impulses were magnetically drawn to issues of fatherhood and family, and I wrote poems on these topics throughout the pregnancy. For a while I was dismayed by this, convinced I was writing two different manuscripts that might never be finished or would only work as chapbooks. And then I also had poems that fit in neither sequence. But a mentor of mine, William Wenthe, wisely suggested the poems were more closely related than I had believed. He was right, and once I saw the connections, I was able to conceive of the manuscript as a cohesive whole. At that point the challenge became finding an appropriate structure for the book.
I considered sequestering the Smyrna poems, the pregnancy poems, and the “miscellaneous” in separate sections, but that obscured all the resonances between them. Instead I tried grouping poems that shared some thematic resonance. At one point I had something like eight or nine different sections, which was a bit too disjointed. Thinking in terms of narrative helped me find the book’s final structure, which has five sections; this final arrangement highlights common themes between poems and also opens narrative threads that are gradually tied together as the book moves along. Two of the final three poems, “Claudia Blackwood Has Her Doubts” and “Cut,” were the last poems I drafted; by that point I was consciously looking for effective ways to close out the book.
NA
You also weave between the miraculous and the humdrum, between hope and disillusionment. It’s so convincing, especially in a book where faith and childbirth and a father-son relationship are major topics. And what a perfect finale—that last stanza. I am hoping you will post that stanza here?
BN
Certainly. Here’s the final stanza of “Cut,” which is an eight-page poem:
I have only just made peace
with having a father,
and here you are to make me one.
Blood and vernix and milia
cover you—flat-nosed, puffy-eyed,
cone-headed, flushed and wailing
and wet in the nurse’s hands.
Your mother waits for you.
In my left hand a clamp,
scissors in my right. The blades
bite down.
NA
The title is perfect. At what point did you know the title of the book? How did the title come to you?
BN
The title Love’s Labors came to me very late in the process—shortly before sending the manuscript to CavanKerry. As my dissertation the collection was called But You Are Rich, a phrase taken from the book’s epigraph: “And to the angel of the church in Smyrna write: . . . I know your tribulation and your poverty (but you are rich)” (Rev. 2:8-9). I was never fully satisfied with that title but couldn’t think of anything I liked better for the longest time. Finally I just started making a really long list, like 25-30 possibilities. At some point I began toying with variations on Shakespeare’s play Love’s Labours Lost. Having the word “love” in the title risks sounding sentimental, but hey, so does writing so many poems about having a baby, or about issues of faith. (A poet friend, a former professor of mine, has told me I somehow get away with writing about subjects that usually lead to treacle. I guess that’s a compliment?) But so many of the poems grapple with some variety of love—familial, sexual, divine—and I liked the way “labors” evokes work, working class people, and childbirth. Hitting on Love’s Labors was like a puzzle piece finally snapping into place.
NA
I love the local characters. I especially love the opening stanza of your poem, “Esther Green Plans a Funeral.” I can just hear her talking. I imagine you hear these people in your head when you are writing?
BN
Yeah, writing those persona poems is a mixture of listening and conjuring. Esther was the first of the Smyrna characters I worked with, and once I got into her voice it felt very comfortable. Growing up in Louisiana, of course, I was surrounded by southern women with very strong and distinct voices. So I had that history to draw on.
NA
Sydney Lea wrote a beautiful introduction to the book. Is he one of your mentors?
BN
He’s not, actually, though he’s a poet for whom I have great respect. I did meet Syd when he visited Texas Tech in 2011, where I did my Ph.D., and he was wonderful to talk to, and he gave an excellent reading. What I love about Syd and his poetry is that he’s so adept and comfortable writing in form and meter, but he’s not tendentious about it or strictly bound to it the way some formalists can be.
NA
These poems are so engaging, so intimate and entertaining, I am wondering what the secret is. As if you could tell me. What is your creative process like?
BN
Ha! If there’s a secret, I wish I knew it. Sometimes it seems the process is different for every poem, and that’s not far from the truth, I think. But generally speaking, I carry an idea in my head for a while before I every write anything down. When I finally do start writing, I try to get down a complete draft. Then, over a period of weeks or months, the poem goes through revision after revision. One round of revision may be focused on the narrative, if there is one, then on images, the next on syntax, then line breaks, then sonic effects; eventually these things run together, but learning to focus my attempts at revision in this way has been tremendously helpful to me.
NA
What was the most challenging part of writing this book?
BN
The most challenging poems to write were “Claudia Blackwood Has Her Doubts” and “Cut.” I was pushing myself to expand the scope of my writing when I wrote these, so they’re both longer poems. The former poem is also a sonnet crown, and there’s something very Sisyphean about that form. Next time I try one it probably won’t be a dramatic monologue in a female voice. Aside from those poems, the biggest challenge was finding the right structure and sequence.
NA
Who are your primary literary influences?
BN
Frost is big for me, though that’s probably not a very fashionable answer these days. Even more unfashionable, but probably responsible for my penchant for persona poems, are Edgar Lee Masters and E.A. Robinson. More recent influences would include B.H. Fairchild, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Robert Lowell, Natasha Trethewey. Richard Wilbur. Rita Dove’s early book Thomas and Beulah.
NA
I’d like to close with a poem of your choice.
Pfc. Mason Buxton Wets a Hook
All warfare is based on deception.
—Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Whether you’re wiping out a phantom weapons cache
or planting homemade bombs in cardboard boxes,
trash cans, saddlebags—Sun Tzu was right:
the lie lies dead at the heart of war. By it
we live and die. The art’s in choosing lures.
(A shiner? Melon lizard? Chartreuse worm?)
That’s part. But a naked lie won’t nail a bass.
You hide the hook inside. Then drop the bait
between two cypress stumps, jig your rod
at five Mississip, crack open a cold one. Sip.
He bites, you set and reel—then watch the lake explode.
For my final blog post, I’ve been asked to answer the question, “What do you know now, that you wished you’d known when you started this journey?” Rather than expounding on a single possible answer to this question, a list seems in order:
I know that I have an amazingly supportive wife and family.
I know that I have exceedingly generous colleagues, students, and friends.
I know that CavanKerry Press is run by wonderful, poetry-loving people.
I know that I have the endurance to write a book.
I know that readers have connected with my poems (click and scroll down to read the first review of Love’s Labors, on p. 70 of this issue of The Oklahoma Review).
I know that readers have been puzzled by my poems (one—a family friend—contacted me on Facebook to ask for a reader’s guide).
I know that small-press publishing is a labor of love.
I know that publishing a book requires lots of collaboration.
I know that poetry can matter—and does—to more people than we think.
I suppose I knew some of this already, to some extent, before the journey to Love’s Labors began. But there are degrees of knowing. And the experience of writing, submitting, editing, and publishing my book has deepened my understanding of and my gratitude for all that I knew, and know better, and will come to learn more fully still.
Like interconnecting stories that form a novel, the poems in Brent Newsom’s debut collection, LOVE’S LABORS, coalesce into a narrative of an indelible place and its people. A southern community marked by family, work, violence, passion, patriotism, faith, and skepticism – that is to say, all that makes us human – is brought to singular life in these penetrating poems, some of which have appeared in such journals as Southern Review, Tar River Poetry, Louisiana Literature, and The Oklahoma Review. These poems are about our relationships, corporal and spiritual, and about the everyday miracles we encounter in our lives.
“Miracles will always be questionable, of course,” writes Sydney Lea in his foreword to the book, “yet we can’t help but believe in the author’s wisdom, finding in his work a scope and resourcefulness that do feel miraculous, even as they feel non-miraculous, in the sense that Newsom pays the keenest and ultimately the most loving attention to the quotidian lives of his collection’s creatures….The vigor and resourcefulness of Brent Newsom’s language and his varied formats—from the most strictly conventional to the most wide-open free verse—would be enough to command our applause; marry these to the wisdom I mentioned at the outset, and to a fellow-feeling that far transcends mere toleration, and you have, as you will soon see, a work not only artful but also, if we attend to its example, morally improving. One can’t ask much more of poetry.”
These characters come alive through their interactions: a G.I. carrying the weight of the Iraqi war; a widow, freed from the ties of husband and children, discovering new aspects of life; a redneck auto mechanic with a dangerous sexual energy—each harbors surprising sensitivities in a complex heart. And then there is another, perhaps the poet himself, who chronicles his wife’s pregnancy (love’s most miraculous labor) and the apprehensions of the coming of fatherhood with keen-eyed wonder:
We’ll take you home to four small rooms,
one just for you: your name brilliant
in bubbled letters, glass balloons
like buoys in the corner. Your mother
pressing you to her breast, we’ll step
into our asthmatic old apartment,
an April wind rushing in behind,
fresh oxygen borne in our blood.
(from “Ode to the Heart”)
A central concern in Newsom’s poetry, faith lives comfortably alongside the secular affairs that fill these small town lives. Another character, a minister’s wife, has her doubts as she sits respectably in the pew and listens to her husband’s sermon. Prayer sustains the anxious father-to-be. The damaged army private finds grace in the silences of home that offer the possibility of something larger, and more mysterious. Even the town’s name, Smyrna, gently nods to the Book of Revelation that guides both Catholics and Protestants in the Bible Belt community.
This poet’s voice, honest and unvarnished, forever seeks simple, universal truths: “I learned that faithful care/for what’s not yours, and pride in your labor (like a father’s/in his son), and light enough to finish what you start/are each a kind of grace” (“Inheritance”). Marked by formal control and emotional range, the poems in LOVE’S LABORS are deceptively straightforward and profoundly moving.
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When my author copies of Love’s Labors were delivered to our house, I was still at work. So my wife packed up the box of books and our two kids and surprised me at the office. It’s fitting, of course, that my family celebrated this moment with me; the book wouldn’t exist without them.
An extended sequence of poems in the collection deals with the joy, anticipation, and sheer anxiety I felt in the months leading up to the birth of our firstborn—the weight and wonder of becoming a father. (That’s him posing as a ninja in the photo, by the way—sporting his Lego Star Wars PJs because it was “pajama day” at school.) All of that joy, anticipation, and anxiety was met, of course, by a greater joy, and by the realization of immense responsibility. No matter how much we had prepared to bring home a newborn, there was suddenly so much to do and so much to learn.
I don’t want to push the analogy too far, lest I confuse my priorities, but publishing a first book has been a little like bringing home that first newborn. There were the months of anticipation and preparation, laced throughout with a similar cocktail of mixed emotions—giddiness, fear, pleasure, worry. And now the book is here, and there’s suddenly so much to do and so much to learn. I want to give the book a firm footing in the world, and to honor the faith that CavanKerry has shown by publishing it. Happily, where a newborn demands continual feedings and diapers and bathing and soothing, a book simply asks to be read and shared.
From now through the end of April, that means lots of travel to give readings and attend conferences. In case you’re wondering if we might wind up in the same zip code for a few hours, here’s the itinerary:
Perhaps I’ll see a few of you at one of these spots, and we can meet and talk poetry for a bit. Or we can do the same (well—a digital approximation of it) on Twitter. If not, I’ll be doing some other traveling eventually, and maybe I’ll wind up in your neck of the woods. A couple of lines from Whitman come to mind: “Missing me one place search another, / I stop somewhere waiting for you.”
My wife’s white-socked feet
polish the gray vinyl tile of our kitchen.
She spins from fridge to stove
while I stand at the cutting board,
cilantro on the altar, a sacrifice
to the tiny tongue-throned gods
of our taste buds
who, later, will convene in a kiss
like the pantheon on Olympus
or fallen angels in the lake of fire.
Maybe it’s the garlic,
the pungent onion, the ginger singed
in hot oil spreading itself
over the base of the wok,
or else the cilantro’s scent
wafting its message, I am green,
I am the essence of freshness,
like wisps of smoke from a censer,
this choir of fragrance chanting praise
in harmony amid the stained-glass hues
of carrot, tomato, spinach,
whatever progeny of earth and seed
she’s found in the crisper,
while rice simmers on the back burner,
white bubbles pressed together,
rising, lifting the glass lid till it rattles
and, senses buzzing, she breaks
into motion, some jaunty bounce,
knees bent, arms raised, the dance
of a child who has not learned
to fear, of a priestess
enthralled, of a woman in love.
She stays the knife beneath my hand,
pulls me into her movements,
and—two bubbles conjoined—
our bodies make a single swaying temple.
From Love’s Labors
By Brent Newsom
I am home with my two kids when the call comes. It’s early August, midafternoon. Snack time. Water and ants on a log. No—be honest, Brent—probably it is Goldfish and apple juice. My son, four, sits at the dining room table, my daughter, not quite two, still in a high chair. Hot as Hades out in the Oklahoma sun, and not much cooler in our dining room, a converted sunroom with tall windows and three skylights on the west side of the house. My phone buzzes in my pocket. No name on the caller ID. A New Jersey area code. Telemarketer, no doubt. A call I would ignore if it came two weeks later, at the beginning of a new semester. But the kids are occupied, I’m bored, what the heck. I answer: Hello. This is he. (No—honest, Brent—This is him.)
A woman on the other line introduces herself: Teresa Carson, Associate Publisher of CavanKerry Press. It takes a moment or two for this to register. To remember the manuscript I sent off back in March. To realize this person does not want to sell me anything. She is not offering a free cruise if I just answer a few simple questions and pass a credit check. She is not conducting a national poll of randomly selected poets living in landlocked states with panhandles. She wants to publish my book. I sit down. She wants to publish my book.
I remember sitting down, though I remember little else of my conversation with Teresa. That was the first surprise in the process of making my book, and it still surprises me some days: This is really happening. They want to publish my book. But there have been other surprises too, starting with how long the process would take. Teresa initially told me I could expect the book to come out in something like the spring of 2025. Ages and ages hence, it seemed, whatever it was exactly. No matter. The book was accepted. I could wait. Then another surprise: something had changed, and the release date was moved up to spring 2015. Suddenly there was so much to do and so little time.
And it seemed each step of the process contained another small surprise of one kind or another. Developmental editing, for example: an email came out of the blue one day from an editor who doesn’t appear on CavanKerry’s masthead, a poet whom I greatly respect. (He had some very helpful comments, with blessedly few criticisms.) Or copyediting: something in Microsoft Word made my manuscript’s formatting go wonky when I sent it to the copyeditor. (Multiple emails later, an unformatted version finally displayed correctly on her computer.) Marketing and promotion: writers with small presses often write their own marketing copy. (I’d rather write a poem any day.) Cover art: getting permission to use a woodcut image by J. J. Lankes, who illustrated some of Robert Frost’s work and about whom Sherwood Anderson wrote in Virginia Quarterly Review in 1931, turned out to be too difficult. (Instead I chose a fantastic photo by my friend, graphic designer Corey Lee Fuller.)
Each of these surprises, of course, is a consequence of that first one, the one that came with an unexpected phone call on a hot August day. When I hung up, I was trembling with nervous energy and a quickened pulse. I stood to my feet and, searching for anyone with whom to celebrate this good news, looked at my four-year-old son, and said, “They’re going to publish my book!” Unaware that the world had somehow fundamentally changed in the past few minutes—no longer so oppressively hot, so drearily summerish, now glowing with light and grace—he looked at me warily, chewing all the while, and gave me a thumbs up. (Four-year-olds are good for keeping things in perspective.) “Dad,” he asked, “can I have more Goldfish?”
Brent Newsom tunes narrative and lyric impulses to an idiom rooted in his native Louisiana. Love’s Labors plumbs themes of family, work, and sex, from a perspective both tempered and troubled by the language and traditions of Christian faith.
We probably have Byron to thank for the myth of the solitary creative genius. He (traditionally the genius is a he) is dark, brooding, militantly independent, radically resistant to the social pressure to conform, and out of this rugged, idiosyncratic, emotionally complicated individual emanate (if he doesn’t die first) works of artistic brilliance and depth mere mortals can only analyze in term papers. We’re all familiar with him in one form or another.
Literary critics like Roland Barthes have been calling “bull” on the idea of privileged, solitary authorship for half a century, though. A work of literature, one strain of the argument goes, is always the product of many influences, and usually results from the efforts of many people aside from the “author.” Editors, for instance.
Paradoxically, most good editors do their best to stay out of a writer’s way. Their goal isn’t to inject their own vision into the project but to enable the writer’s vision to come to fruition (the case of Raymond Carver and his editor Gordon Lish notwithstanding). In bringing Love’s Labors to print, I have been fortunate to work with editors of just this kind. Starr Troup, Managing Editor of CavanKerry Press, has gently shepherded the book from one editorial reading to another. It’s humbling, honoring, and a little frightening to have multiple readers (who are accomplished poets themselves) combing through my work, drawing attention to the occasional weak line or false note. But the result is undoubtedly a stronger book.
Writers and artists certainly need solitude to do their work, but they also need community—the kind of relationships that nurture creativity and that last year led a writer in the New York Times Book Review to declare “The End of ‘Genius.’” Art-making, he points out, is often as collaborative as it is solitary, frequently evident in pairs of artists who influence each other: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Numerous people helped me, in one way or another, arrive at the collection of poems that is Love’s Labors. Family, friends, classmates, professors. I’ll save the list (a partial one, no doubt) for the acknowledgments page. But working with the CavanKerry Press editorial team has distilled that notion of creative community into a months-long collaborative process, a process that reinforces my sense of self in two important ways: I am not a genius. And I am not alone.
New poetry collections seldom register as even a blip on the radar of contemporary American culture, especially if it’s a poet’s first. We’re much more preoccupied with TV, film, and the listicles that populate our Facebook news feeds. Even fiction and memoir get their share of press, or at least have the prospect of being discussed in a book club. So to friends, family, and acquaintances who don’t read poetry, the news that I am publishing a book of poems tends to provoke the obligatory congratulations layered on top of a glassy-eyed blankness. Or, if I’m lucky, a new found inquisitiveness: You’re a poet? Do you do slams?
When CKP asked me to blog about the inspiration and process of writing Love’s Labors, and about the manuscript submission process, I knew exactly what to write. Not so with the topic for this post: what getting published means for me right now in my career. It’s perhaps easier to say what it does not mean: no fame, no fortune. And though I’m an Assistant Professor of English, my institution places much greater emphasis on teaching than publications; so publishing a book (while appreciated) certainly doesn’t grant me tenure, either.
But there are a few things that the occasion of my first book certainly does bring with it:
Know your deadline, and don’t miss it. This is a cardinal rule for taxpayers filing their Form 1040, for patients enrolling in health insurance plans, and for writers sending off their manuscripts.
I knew the CavanKerry Press submission deadline in spring 2013. I’d written it on a Post-It note that stayed stuck to my desk for months: March 31. I’d decided to focus my publishing efforts on presses with an open reading period and a clear editorial vision I could connect with. CavanKerry was at the top of that list. They had published books by poets I deeply admire, like Laurie Lamon, Ross Gay, Nin Andrews, and Robert Cording. Their books are beautifully designed, pleasing to the touch and to the eye. And their slogan, “Lives Brought to Life,” gave me a hunch my work might fit CKP’s aesthetic.
So, March 31 was marked on my calendar well in advance. I even knew that March 31 was a Sunday, so I’d actually have to mail my manuscript by March 30. I had the manuscript, titled Love’s Labors, ready in plenty of time. I’d sent earlier versions to first-book contests, and most of the poems I’d worked and reworked for several years. I set about working and reworking my cover letter in similar fashion: it had to summarize the book’s themes and describe my aesthetic approach and show my familiarity with the press and prove I was ready for the “first book” stage of a writing career, without sounding too desperate or pandering or self-important or aloof or showy or . . . Writing a good cover letter, I determined, is at least as hard as writing a good poem. Finally, it was done. I would print the manuscript, go through it one last time on Friday afternoon, and mail that sucker off first thing Saturday morning, postmarked March 30.
Only, when I got to my local post office Saturday morning—and there’s only one in Shawnee, Oklahoma, population 30,000—it was closed. In fact, it’s closed every Saturday. (I’d lived in Shawnee less than a year. I was still learning.) That’s how I wound up racing down Highway 177 with a big yellow envelope on the passenger seat of my car, my heart pounding, and praying that USPS.com was correct when it said that the P.O. in Tecumseh—population 6,500—was open for two precious, merciful hours on Saturday mornings. The whole drive down, though, I pictured the sign in the post office window, with the same message CavanKerry would give if the envelope wasn’t mailed today: “Sorry, We’re Closed.”
But they weren’t. I made it in time. The envelope was weighed and the postage paid. And then I drove home, at a decidedly unhurried pace, and began to wait.
In the writer’s life—or in this writer’s life, at least—inspiration and process are names for the two faces of a Janus: one looking forward, the other looking back, and back, and back. Inspiration, the rush of words and ideas spilling forth in the euphoria of a creative moment, looks ever forward like a mad, visionary genius, saying, “Good, yes, keep going, this is going to be great, the best thing you’ve written—no: that’s ever been written!” And while you know inspiration is a flatterer and a flirt and given to hyperbole, you’re tempted to listen. Process, the plodding and drawn-out work of revision, of tinkering and refining a stanza or a line or a phrase, is the more prudent of these twins (and the boring one at cocktail parties). Process looks back at the page and points to the cliché in the very first line, to the awkward phrasing, to the weak line endings, to the muddled metaphors and lackluster language. And Process has the gall to ask, “What is this poem about, anyway?”
Of course these creative forces aren’t so opposed as I’ve made them seem. Like Janus’s two faces, they’re attached. They overlap and interweave. Invite process for brunch, and inspiration will probably show up too. (Who doesn’t love brunch?) Scrapping the second quatrain of your sonnet—those easy rhymes and the halting meter—makes way for a new burst of inspired energy, one that could make the poem richer and more surprising than before. And when you’re talking about a book, not just a single poem, inspiration and process are layered together so thickly they’re nearly inseparable.
The earliest poems that will be included in Love’s Labors were drafted in 2007. I was living in Louisiana, the state where I was born and raised, and to which I’d returned after living other places. In a burst of creative inspiration, I began writing short narrative poems set in a fictional Louisiana town I called Smyrna. I peopled the town with citizens and like those I’d observed in my home state—salt-of-the-earth people with their inherent contradictions and struggles and celebrations and faults. I envisioned a whole book of these poems. A Spoon River Anthology of sorts for Louisiana in the twenty-first century. But the revision process revealed certain weaknesses with this scheme: poems overpopulated with peripheral characters, a lack of clear focal points, the possible tedium a reader might feel when faced with one persona poem after another. Over the next few years I scrapped some of those poems and reshaped others, focused on a few recurring characters.
Meanwhile, in 2008 my wife became pregnant with our first child, and the prospect of becoming a father unleashed inspiration in a big way. Though I knew it was dangerous—how to write about babies without producing treacly sap?—I found it hard to write about anything else. But what about the Smyrna idea? Would these poems be part of a different manuscript? And then there were, occasionally, poems seemingly unrelated to either of these driving forces. Where did they fit?
As inspiration and process did their work over the next couple of years, a web of shared themes emerged: issues related to place, family, and faith, as well as motifs of automotive imagery and a concern with America’s twenty-first century wars. By 2010 I’d drafted all of the poems that remain in the collection. I began to see that the poems spoke to one another in ways I hadn’t noticed or anticipated as I was writing them. I was in the doctoral program in English at Texas Tech University then, and the community of poets there helped me greatly to see such connections where I’d missed them before: it wasn’t two or three different books I was writing, but one book. I developed an early version of the collection (with a title I later abandoned) as the creative portion of my dissertation project.
But the work of restructuring the book and revising the poems continued up until CavanKerry Press accepted the manuscript in 2013, and then after that, throughout the editorial process, up until July 2014. (Remember: process looks back, and back, and back.) By the time the book is published, eight years will have passed since those earliest poems were drafted, making Love’s Labors a true labor of love. It’s a labor I’m proud of precisely because inspiration and process have both been given their due.
CavanKerry is grateful for additional support received from the following organizations:
