![]() A mole would be, I’m trying to think of someone-įisher: Maybe Paul Celan as a mole? It’s a bit surprising given his inventiveness, but because of his psychic trauma, it was like he could never get away from circling around the same issues. Muriel Rukeyser, Marilyn Hacker, Gwendolyn Brooks, all foxes. Wallace Stevens is a mole, pointing to the same thing over and over again. Reeves: Yeah, I think I’m more of a fox than a mole. It’s always moving into other territory.įisher: Would you say you’re more of a fox? The mole tunnels down into the earth, as opposed to the fox who is trying to leap and run all over the countryside. I think the idea that you’re writing the same poem over and over illustrates this idea of a mole. Solmaz Sharif once offered me this great analogy in terms of animals, the mole and the fox. Whether they are formal and aesthetic obsessions, or subject matter obsessions. Reeves: I think you’ll circle around the same obsessions. I hope that’s not true, it feels so limiting. It’s like for every seven poems I write, there’s one I keep.įisher: There is a school of thought that claims you’re always writing the same poem over and over, you have one idea that you’re trying to get out. It is nine years since my first book came out, but I’ve written a lot more than what’s in the second. So it took me a long time to write my second book. The types of beauty and freedom that I want to express have changed. I think my standards are higher for what I want. ![]() I had this really long poem called “On Paradise,” and I just didn’t know how to revise it and wasn’t going to put it out just because it was cohesive. I actually thought another book was going to be the second book, but I didn’t know how to edit it. For every book I put out, I’ve written two to three. So to answer your question more directly, what was it like for me, I’ve noticed a pattern in my book writing, which is that I write two for one. There are all these things I learned watching my first book come out and how it was received that I wanted to do differently or I wanted to extend. There’s a way in which you’re writing your second book even as you’re writing your first book. For example, my first book came out when I was thirty-three, but it’s not as though all those years were used up in the writing of one book. ![]() I think it’s the same for the second book, we just don’t think we think of it that way. I want to start by picking up some of the language you started with, which was that you have all the time in the world to write the first book. Roger Reeves: I have so many thoughts on this. Can you tell me about the process of writing your second book? After that freedom, writing a second book must be daunting. Francis Fisher: It sometimes feels like a writer has all the time in the world to come up with a first book. Over Zoom, we chatted about jazz, fatherhood, and his new book, Best Barbarian (W. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he is a Suzanne Young Murray Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Zacharis First Book Award from Ploughshares, and a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Book Award. His first book, King Me (Copper Canyon Press, 2013), won the Levis Reading Prize from Virginia Commonwealth University, the John C. ![]() He has received a Whiting Award, two Pushcart Prizes, a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton University, a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship, and a Ruth Lilly Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation. He is associate professor of English and creative writing at the University of Texas at Austin. Roger Reeves’s poems have appeared in The American Poetry Review, The Best American Poetry 2014, Boston Review, The New Yorker, Ploughshares, Poetry, and Tin House, among other publications. ![]()
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