Visiting with Joseph Wood
by Claire Guyton, Art + Life Editor
What inspired your poem “Westward Expansion”?
I was in Kentucky last summer for a residency and had forty-five random books on hand. Topics included the history of stained glass, New World immigration patterns, the 1927 flood of the Mississippi, medieval prostitution, Roman canal systems, and so on. I simply wrote something like a thousand phrases or ideas down in a notebook. This poem came from those notes—and from living in Tucson 10 years ago.
Tell us about your writing process—either generally or specifically with regard to the birth and development of this poem.
Like how I used to train when I was runner—periodization. September through December, I take off from writing. January through early March, I just do random lines or shit drafts, note-taking, and so on. April I taper down. May through August I really go on a tear, revisiting those early lines, cannibalizing old poems, looking at notes.
If you painted this poem, what colors would you use?
A blue and yellow so bright that it induces nausea. Before I lived in the Southwest, I never thought I’d resent the sun.
What books have had the most impact on your writing?
Well, forty-five of them for this project, but generally speaking, all of Denis Johnson’s poetry, Frank Stanford’s The Battlefield Where The Moon Says I Love You, and anything by Whitman, William Carlos Williams, John Clare, and Jon Anderson. Anything that, as de Tocqueville said of American poetry, “would be of the future.” And as an ancillary—what Williams says in I Wanted To Write A Poem about how Eliot and Pound had more learning than he did, but they were always looking backwards while he wanted to look forward—that’s what I aspire to and where I’ve failed so often as a writer.
*Contact Claire with any questions or suggestions for Hunger Mountain’s Art + Life section at hungermtnal@gmail.com.
