#433 Backstory of the Poem “America” from the poetry collection WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING? By Pauletta Hansel, published Shadelandhouse Modern Press, on April 23, 2024
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Can you go through the step-by-step process of writing this poem from the moment the idea was first conceived in your brain until final form?
“America” is an abecedarian, meaning that each line begins with the ordered letters of the alphabet, which was the prompt I offered my students and myself in my “From Draft to Craft” poetry class in March 2017. The poem also includes lines of songs, which was not part of the original prompt but probably came to me after the first couple of lines. I say “probably” because of the numbers of years that have passed. But I certainly remember the feeling behind the poem, there in the first days of what we now know is the first Trump presidency.
As a class, we read a couple of abecedarians, including Natalie Diaz’s amazing “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” and chose our topics. Choosing a topic and an opening line were pretty easy; it was hard to write about anything else during that time. America gave me the “a” and then the rest followed pretty easily.
Click on the below link to view “Abecedarian Requiring Further Examination of Anglikan Seraphym Subjugation of a Wild Indian Rezervation” by Natalie Diaz
Where were you when you started to actually write the poem? And please describe the place in great detail.
In 2017, I was offering the class through a Thomas Moore College, though the students were all or mostly adult poets. (I still offer the class, but now I am free-lance, and it is usually held via Zoom.) That semester, we were in a large-ish room off the dining room called “The Chancellor’s Room” where administration had meetings and lunches. There were rectangular tables set up in a square, with all us poets around the outside of the square in rolling chairs. Windows on one side, but with the blinds closed as it was evening. Florescent lighting above and some AV material and a whiteboard scattered around. I sat facing the door, as I almost always do. Probably my student/friend Kris sat on one side of me and Chuck on the others, as those were their customary spots. Not the loveliest room, but certainly the loveliest people.
Were there any lines in any of your rough drafts of this poem that were not in the final version? And can you share them with us?
There were not huge changes, as with an abecedarian you are pretty much stuck. (Poet/teacher Barbara Hamby calls it “The Abecedarian Corset” in her chapter in Wingbeats: Exercises and Practice in Poetry.) But there was one section I reworked in subsequent days: “This land is my only home/ unraveling at its seams. I do not hear its/ varied carols sung strong/ with each singing what belongs…” became “This land is my only home, America,/ unsound in its frame. You are deaf now, to our/ varied carols sung across your shorn mountains, above your/ withered plains…” The switch to “unsound in its frame” felt more appropriate to the “home” imagery, and the rest of it picked up on the song, “America” which begins the poem. I also got rid of the article “a” in a few places.
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What do you want readers of this poem to take from this poem?
I’m not sure that I had an original intent for readers—it was more a speaking of my own truth, but since its publication I have found readers who say that it also speaks their emotions about the state of our country, then and now, and I am grateful to know this.
Click on the link to view the website of Pauletta Hansel
Which part of the poem was the most emotional of you to write and why?
I think that the first surprise for me in the poem was in the fourth and fifth lines, “I did not know I loved you, America, / even broken as you were…” I’ve never considered myself a particularly patriotic person, but writing the poem made me more aware of what I had in fact loved, and taken for granted, abut America. That line still makes me a little weepy. The end, too, beginning with “exiled” (a cheat for the letter “x”) is a gift of the form in that it allowed me to speak an emotional truth I may not have gotten to without the need to follow the abecedarian rules.
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Two places: Pine Mountain Sand & Gravel Vol 21: Appalachia Acting Up and Will There Also Be Singing? (Shadelandhouse Modern Press, 2024). The latter includes most of the political poems I wrote during those years that had not found their way into other, more personal collections. I like to say that whereas in most of the books, “the personal is political” as is any speaking of truth about our lives as women, as Appalachians, etc., but in Will There Also Be Singing? the political is most definitely personal.
Click on the link below to read about Pauletta Hansel’s new poetry collection WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING?
