‘Parking Lot’ and ‘Cassandra’ were generated in a workshop on ‘Hungry Ghosts’ which was conducted by Joan Koan Glass. I had admired Joan’s “ghost” poems in her book Daughter of Three Kingdoms Gone, which I had reviewed for Trampoline. In Korean culture, the Hungry Ghosts are aspects of the self that are, well, hungry— unsatisfied, starved, screaming to be heard.

Both pieces started as prose poems (or a string of lines) in a notebook; that’s how I typically draft poems. (As an aside, my cursive script is huge, so one little poem takes pages.) Typically, my poems begin in this undefined way. I let myself write into the idea until I exhaust the thought or, ideally, (as with ‘Parking Lot’) I arrive at a new thought. Then I’ll work on the lines and imagery and meter, and the form makes itself clear. For example, certain pieces “feel” like sonnets because they’re hinting at argument, which (to me) is the core of the sonnet.

I like to write what I call “funny/sad” poems— my most recent chapbook (Any Excuse for a Party) is devoted to them. ‘Parking Lot’ is a good example of this; the details about the clothes, etc, are light, while the death of a parent is obviously not. Layering in bits of dry humor is part of the revision process— as is stripping out anything that explains too much. With ‘Cassandra’ — I had long wanted to write a Cassandra poem, but I floundered; I’m not wild about plopping arcane mythology into poems (oh, of course, that river god!) Then, I decided to make myself a California-style Cassandra; this is a place famous for earthquakes and fires. I kept changing the images and the types of disasters ….but the final lines were always in my mind.