3 Questions and a Poem–in which one of my favorite poets is interviewed and shares a poem.
Question 1
What do you consider the three most important elements of a poem?
There are so many possible answers to this question, and my answer will probably be different if you ask me again a year from now, but today I think the most important elements of a poem are imagery, emotion, and the unexpected, and these three things all reinforce each other, of course. First, poems must have vivid imagery to open the doors of our imaginations, our memories, our desires and fears, and appeal to the senses, evoking the second important thing: emotion. Whether the poem is about a summer garden or an annoying neighbor, I expect to feel something – something new or old, but whatever it is, I’ll hold on to it even after I’ve read the poem. Finally, I like when a poem surprises me. This often happens in those final lines where the poem takes me some place I didn’t expect to go; I live for “oh, wow” moments in a poem; those “oh, wow” poems are the ones I return to again and again.
Question 2
What’s your best advice for writing poetry?
So, I don’t have a process for writing poems. Some of my poems are pretty much formed from the time they get from my head to the page and others take more time. A lot more time. I do a lot of thinking before I ever start to write a new poem. I may start with a line or two and work from there. I may know the incident or memory or moment I want to capture but have no idea how I will get it all out until I start writing. I tell my students not to force anything. If you’re having to work super hard to get a line or image or metaphor to work, then maybe it doesn’t belong in that poem; maybe it belongs somewhere else. Some poems are harder to write than others, of course, but I can tell when I’m forcing something, and when that happens, I set the poem aside for a few days until I can look at it again with fresh eyes and ideas.
Question 3
What’s the one poem that everyone should read today?
This is a hard one! I’m going to suggest Elizabeth Bishop’s “Five Flights Up.” The ending gets me every single time. Oof! For me, it definitely has the “oh, wow” factor.
In Phantoms we are visited by the ghosts of the dead, the apparitions of former selves, the specters of what might have been and what should have been, dream-ghosts, even the Holy Ghost – a succession of spirits moving in and out of shadow and light, sometimes at odds with one another, often converging, and ever present, as the speakers mourn shared and personal tragedies and contend with generational and ephemeral losses.
Grisham’s book is available through Finishing Line Press, at Amazon, or wherever you order your books.
And a Poem…
This is the title poem from my recent collection Phantoms (Finishing Line Press, 2023), and also appeared in The Emerson Review, vol. 51, Spring 2022, pg. 32.
PHANTOMS
For Jenny and Carol Your mother scratches the air below her thigh, the nothing-place where her leg should be. I can still feel it, she says, embarrassed, pulling the white sheet to her chest like a child facing a midnight-monster. You smooth her hair, say she’s beautiful and strong, picture her dancing in the kitchen, making Halloween sounds into a spoon, while you balance on a chair, hair combed into a vampire-point, plastic teeth cutting your gums. Suddenly, you remember her tan calves, smooth and muscular from standing all day at the video store and The Brave Little Toaster poster she brought home for you, Baywatch for your brother. You recall, too, the sugar you spooned into her mouth, trips to the ER instead of Friday night parties, the day your father left and she wouldn’t open the bathroom door, the sound of her voice after she learned to talk again, the way she wore her hair before and after, the two lives you lived with her – everything that led to this moment, this loss, this beginning of an end. She looks out the window, turns to face you, the sun’s rays streak the hospital tile, her brown eyes are dark, innocent, full of disbelief. I’m sorry, she says, when she reaches again for the blank space, a memory her body cannot purge, it was just right there.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joanna Grisham (most folx call her Joey) holds an MFA in creative writing from Georgia College & State University. In 2023, she won the Carnegie Center for Literacy & Learning’s Next Great Writers Contest, and she was recently named a semi-finalist for The MacGuffin’s Poet Hunt 28 contest and a finalist for the The Pinch’s2024 Page Prize in Nonfiction.She was also a finalist for the 2021-2022 Very Short Fiction Contest at the Tennessee Williams & New Orleans Literary Festival and a finalist for the 2021 Ember Chasm Review Flash Fiction Contest. Her work has appeared in The Bangalore Review, On the Run, Still: The Journal, Gleam, The Emerson Review, The Write Launch, and other places, and her first chapbook of poems, Phantoms, was published in December 2023 (Finishing Line Press). She lives in Tennessee with her wife and daughter and teaches at Austin Peay State University.
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