As I pieced together the verbal knife strokes of “The Old Woodcarver,” I was remembering German imagist poetry and thinking about the Native view of animals as so much more than what we call “totems.” I tried to capture a woodcarver aware of his subjects as not only emerging from the wood, but entering him, playing an intimate part in his life, a process the artist must surrender to more than create. We sometimes refer to lucid dreaming in relation to such ideas, but it’s more like lucid sleeping, the acceptance of the value and importance of where our internal experience takes us when we invite it, as we do falling into sleep, a choice but an acceptance as well of what is both part of us and beyond us. This is a process that continues into waking, when we allow it, overcome by it as we find ourselves entering the dream creatures awakened in the life already around us. The knife is the instrument of separation that also creates. We may use many things …

This poem came out of a few different impulses…at the time I wrote it I was reading Levinas and Maurice Merleau-Ponty: thinking about the ways in which responsibility and love are inextricable and limitless, and how the only way the external world doesn’t completely overwhelm me is by virtue of the fact that I can ingest it with my eyes. There’s also a strong elegiac streak in here. I lost my best friend when I was twenty, and while that is literally half a lifetime ago today, I don’t think those losses ever leave… I wrote him a number of short poems describing the ways my life was now different than it was, like being able to pay rent (when I last saw him we lived in his car), and one of those short poems made it in here. Visually, the central image of the yellow dress is a portmanteau of a few lines from an album he and I used to listen to. In the end, however, I’m not sure if the poem is more weft …

I wrote “Mother-of-Pearl” in a class in which the only assignments were elegies, persona poems, and lullabies. It was then that I began associating with one another the ideas of loss, façade, and night. Of course, the “lull” in lullaby means to make someone feel deceptively secure—to cover up the longing, grief, and fear that tends to surface just before we go to sleep. There are the lullabies we sing to ourselves and the ones we sing to others. For the speaker of “Mother-of-Pearl,” there is no distinction. Her lullaby is not a song, but a ritual of silence. She wordlessly lulls herself and others not only by concealing her grief, but also by turning her lies into pearls. I wanted her body to enact the lullaby, and so I gave her the power of mollusks. The nature of mollusks and pearls appealed to me for their concentric layers, which seemed apt as a metaphor for withholding. There are many poems in which mollusks and pearls feature prominently; two of my favorites include “Whelks,” by …

It feels strange to write an “introduction” for this piece because—while writing the poem—what I thought it was “about” kept shifting. When I thought I was describing old-fashioned, human meanness, what I actually wrote was a mere caricature of that meanness. When I began to humanize that caricature, to make it more tangible and honest, what I wrote was actually about empathy. When I thought I was revising a poem about empathy, it turned into a study of the complicity—the speaker’s or the world’s—that allows the terrible to be terrible. When I went to finish the poem about complicity, a poem about meanness emerged. This poem is a revolving door of those elements, which (in its own way) is probably a more actuate portrayal of that human characteristic I originally set out to describe. (Olzmann) Super Villains The New Face of Evil dreamed it was an eagle ripping the lungs from a sparrow, or it was an altar for human sacrifice, or it was seated at the head of a long table in a boardroom …

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