“Temple Near Quang Tri,

Not On the Map”

Dusk, the ivy thick with sparrows

squawking for more room

is all we hear; we see

birds move on the walls of the temple

shaping their calligraphy of wings.

Ivy is thick in the grottoes,

on the moon-watching platform

and ivy keeps the door from fully closing.

The point man leads us and we are

inside, lifting

the white washbowl, the smaller bowl

for rice, the stone lanterns

and carved stone heads that open

above the carved faces for incense.

But even the bamboo sleeping mat

rolled in the corner,

even the place of prayer, is clean.

And a small man

sits legs askew in the shadow

the farthest wall casts

halfway across the room.

He is bent over, his head

rests on the floor and he is speaking something

as though to us and not to us.

The CO wants to ignore him;

he locks and loads and fires a clip into the walls

which are not packed with rice this time

and tells us to move out.

But one of us moves toward the man,

curious about what he is saying.

We bend him to sit straight

and when he’s nearly peaked

at the top of his slow uncurling,

his face becomes visible, his eyes

roll down to the charge

wired between his teeth and floor.

The sparrows

burst off the walls into the jungle.

Beyond that vital aspect, most speakers in my poems are what someone once characterized as haggards of urban or pastoral loneliness — bluesy, isolated and marginalized figures who deal with a wide range of losses; unmoored souls, negotiating flawed lives in a flawed world.

DPR: What is it about travel and differing environs that turns your thoughts to poetry? Where do you feel most at home?

JA: Travel puts me in the heartlands of my poetic obsessions. My muse is a forerunner whereby I often begin writing poems of a certain place long before I travel there. I research places on Google street maps and virtually walk them before being there physically. I am at heart a poet of Place and I must travel. I’ve written poems about fictional incidents in towns I’ve only visited in cyberspace. For instance, a large body of my early work is Southwest regionalism, and I once transferred notes written on a napkin in a real bar in Florida to a mythical one in San Ysidro, California. I simply liked the name San Ysidro; for all I knew, there were no bars there – I just have a love for Latinate names, and I needed grist for a poem I wanted to situate in a western border town, grist provided by a real bar in Florida. I’ve also written poems based on articles in farm magazines about growing cotton and peanuts. Online sources can aid immensely in your writing, whether researching wildflowers in a country on the other side of the earth, or learning what you need to about specialized tools you suspect are used in a machine shop somewhere in the town you live. In addition to books of poems set in different places in the US, I have three chapbooks whose poems are set in overseas countries: Ireland, Scotland, and Italy. It’s important to state that these poems are set in those countries, they are not about them, per se. I’m only a guest in a region or place. So what often results then, is an invented presence that reflects a widely traveled imagination where my mind determines as the emotional resonance of a place – what reverberates in image, or emotion, with my readers, even if it’s a troubled relationship with the world. I’ll offer one of my 2008 poems as an example of what I mean:

Leaving Provence on a Sunday

The lazing wastrel on Rue Caristie

always takes his place by the fishmonger.

A nurse leans down, puts her hand on his face.

As if shame were redeemed, she rose to leave.

Though he did not rise, his lips brushed her palms.

On the steps of the Palace of Popes

a woman leans to kiss her lover’s neck.

But he seems puzzled, like a scolded child,

fathoms what it means to fall in love, her

voice so arctic she must have fallen first.

Now I certainly had no idea what was really going on in the minds of the young couple on the steps of the popes’ palace there in Avignon back in May of 2008, or what the real life circumstances were of the man I label a “wastrel.” I watched the young couple from a hundred yards off and the boy did appear less interested in kissing than the girl; and the wastrel was enamored of a young lady who had bent down to speak with him. At the time, I told my wife, “I bet he kisses her hand before she goes,” and sure enough, he did. So you see, one can visit Provence without skipping through fields of lavender.

DPR: You have received awards and wide recognition for your excellent writing. How do you approach writing poetry? Is it generally mood-driven, image-driven, emotion-driven, place-driven, or event-driven?

JA: Thank you on the awards. My poems are more Place and mood-driven than by the other aspects. I think of my poems as soulfully plaintive — to pull the reader in through gravitas or pathos — a distillation of emotions and messy characters, their quiet dispossession, even something of the numinous — what remains mysterious or unknown in emotions and aesthetics. The natural and elemental things of the human condition are also vital to me. Like it says in the Intro to Djuna Barnes’ ‘Nightwood’, “There is a truth to these damaged hearts that moves us beyond the negative.”

DPR: Drawing on your prolific creative output and your co-editorship of San Pedro River Review, what pearls of wisdom might you share with novice poets?

JA: So much to say, but I’ll try to be concise. First, never fall prey to the thought of some that ‘you can only write what you know’ – that is, from the real circumstances of your own personal life or experiences; that’s simply nonsense – no one can restrict the fecundity of your imagination. In clear-cut expression, you can make it all up! It’s akin to the line from Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer: “The images are real, even if the whole story is false.” A poem is not sworn testimony, an affidavit, a deposition, a software licensing agreement. As Philip Levine once remarked to Larry Levis, “In a poem you don’t owe anybody a thing.” Fictive elements in your poem are no different than those found in fiction novels. You want to write a poem about a plumber, or firefighter, sailor or accountant? Read online job descriptions, type them up, then turn them into poems using the imaginative creative processes we’ve addressed here. Or again, Richard Hugo said in The Real West Marginal Way, “I saw people who never were, in a place I had never been.” This is akin to what Louisiana Poet Laureate Jack Bedell called an “an originality of utterance” in poetry.

Beyond that, young writers should never be self-referential or employ inward-looking observances that don’t engage the world at large. Universal truths reside in even the most personal of experience, and certainly don’t need to be large philosophical declarations. Attention to a particular place and a particular moment can still evoke in readers a shared experience. Through exploring with informative detail a regional perspective, a writer can still strike a responsive chord with readers and listeners, regardless of place and time.

DPR: What are your favorite things to write about?

JA: Beyond what I’ve mentioned already, most speakers in my poems are what someone once characterized as haggards of urban or pastoral loneliness — bluesy, isolated, and marginalized figures who deal with a wide range of losses; unmoored souls, negotiating flawed lives in a flawed world. For me, such lives are situated most often in deserts, rural areas of the South, small towns, and seacoasts. Beyond that, and overall, there is a wild magic in the process of constructing our poems. If you are a regional, or poet of Place like myself, you will find that researching the grist for your poem often becomes a lesson in geography, earth science, culture, sociology, religion, and so forth. In the process, certain physical elements begin to serve as objective correlatives – the spirit, or symbol of things: sometimes rain nourishes famished crops; at other times it accelerates hypothermia for a homeless man. Now keep in mind that when I say “landscape” I mean it more in terms of psychic landscape, something inextricably tied to image.

DPR: Who influences/inspires your approach to poetry writing? Do you often find yourself writing in the same voice or style?

JA: In my early years of writing poetry, my influences were Yusef Komunyakaa, Kevin Young, Richard Hugo, Jane Kenyon, Philip Levine, and Walt McDonald — but not in that order. I went back and forth between those writers, and still do. In later years I was influenced by darker works such as those of German poet Ingeborg Bachman, Austrian Georg Trakl, the early works of CD Wright and Frank Stanford, and the starker poems of Charles Simic and Adam Zagajewski. There are others, of course, but those poets are the most exemplary. Sometimes I write in their voices or styles, most often my writing is but a refraction of such authors.