An excerpt from a poem faculty member Daniel Tobin (poetry ’90), published by E-Verse Radio.

Alchemical Meditation

It abides in secret on my pencil tip—
Greenland graphite, fossil bodies, the spans
of lost beginnings hoarded from the deeps
into softest stone across geologic time
to bring its word here for the wind to edit,
dawn quickened in folds of a stringent pool.
So life leaps from non-life, leaps outside the loop
of the un-living factum, the material pit,
to ride the sudden unfolding of a tide,
billions of years passing, before it snaps
into the billowing the sea-vents emit;
before it steadies, permeates, picks up speed
to surface dimly from the thrumming deeps.

[…continue reading at E-Verse Radio.]

An excerpt from an interview with faculty member Maurice Manning published by Plume:

I had the pleasure of speaking to Maurice Manning about his forthcoming collection, Railsplitter: Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S. (Copper Canyon, October 2019).

AN: I am interested, first of all, in the title of Railsplitter, subtitled, “Reflections on the Art of Poetry Composed in the Posthumous Voice of Honest Abe Lincoln, former Pres., U.S.” Early in his campaign for presidency, Lincoln was nicknamed “The Railsplitter,” which was, of course, a nod to the kind of physical labor he was known for in his youth and a way of appealing to the common folk by reminding them of his own connection to the land.

To my mind, Railsplitter embodies both the physical and the abstract. Can you speak a little about this, and how you view the title as a way of framing our experience of the poems?

MM: You’re opening question is a great one. Here’s my effort at a response.

In responding to queries from my editors and copy editors at Copper Canyon, the matter of the title came up. Should this book be called Rail Splitter or Rail-splitter, versions of the word that various style manuals prefer. In the end—as all along in my work on this book—I decided to keep the single word formation, Railsplitter. This is indeed a version of the word that appeared in some of Lincoln’s campaign material.

But I also like that the object (rail) is fused to the action (splitter). It suggests a kind of double-meaning or doubled effect, and poetry in general makes use of familiar tools that have a doubling or multiplying effect (such as imagery, simile, and metaphor).

To my thinking, “railsplitter” is also an unintentionally ironic term to apply to Lincoln, who as we know put preserving the Union ahead of all else. In other words, the action of splitting rails out of a log is divisive, even though Lincoln’s political actions were focused on maintaining the Union. So, perhaps the title is an effort to introduce dramatic irony to the reader from the start. Over and over in my reading of Lincoln, his life, and his moment in American history, I stumbled on one ironic fact after another.

Many poems in the book, I think, highlight some of this irony. The great and humbling surprise to me was to realize I did not have to create any of this irony. It’s already there, a feature of our national history. And I imagine that the ironies of our national history were everywhere evident to the real Lincoln.

One of his personal challenges must have been to learn how to live through the ironies that have shaped our country. I do hope the title brings together the physical and the abstract. That seems to be what irony does—it presents us with a reality that cannot be separated from its abstract shadow.

[… continue reading at Plume.]

An excerpt from “An Oboe at Night Among Trees,” a conversation about poetry with faculty member David Baker, curated by Victoria Chang (poetry ’05), published by Tupelo Quarterly.

“An Oboe at Night Among Trees,” a conversation about poetry

VC: As you respond to my questions, I’m remembering how wonderful it was to be your student [I was your student at Warren Wilson twice about 15 years ago and at the Kenyon Review Writers’ Workshop]. In many of your new poems, there’s a narrative thread that travels across the poems.  Is that how a poem begins for you?  Via story?  Or some other way?

DB: I’ve written the poems in Swift over so long a time that it’s hard to make a single summary. The oldest poems here date from 1982 or ‘83, when I was still in school. Even so I haven’t included any poems from my first book, Laws of the Land. That decision took a deep breath to make.

Poems begin for me mysteriously. Yes, sometimes there’s a kind of story I want to tell, or parts of stories. Sometimes it’s just a simple tone—like an oboe at night, among trees. I remember thinking about one poem that I wanted it to sound like that. Sometimes there’s a conundrum I want to address, a dramatic irony to enact. Sometimes I just put my speaker or thinker into motion, into circumstance, and see where he goes and what he does. I do not start a poem with the ending already in mind—or rarely. And the ending is rarely an issue of narrative, but more an issue of music, rhythm, an opening as much as a closing.

Still, I do lean toward narrative. Well, as I say that, I also hope I have some lyric skills. Those aren’t exclusive features, are they? It’s like this. I want to make a type of music out of words—lots of types of music. To play a song you have to have a story, a drama; a tone is a tone and two tones is a drama. It’s inevitable. Whenever we make a sentence, or string a couple of words together, we are already working in the realm of narrative. Language is narrative.

Now, perhaps you’re right that a narrative thread or threads do wind across my new poems. That’s inevitable, since I wrote them. I believe the most interesting threads, for any poem, are the ones we do not will to be there, the ones we don’t purposely intend, but rather the ones that show up unbidden, underneath. I’m thinking about the deeper parts of personality and psyche and imagination, where the fear and the adoration and the revulsion and the hope all hover and conspire. There’s a type of landscape that travels from poem to poem in Swift, to be sure, and a manner of being-in-the-world, and something like a voice eventually emerges.

[…continue reading at Tupelo Quarterly.]