How these poems came to be, you ask. Well, as with most of my poems, I started with a memory from childhood. While a great childhood memory does not a great poem make, it’s a good place to start. I’m a hopelessly narrative poet. My poems tell stories. I like sentences, and I believe in a poetry of the sentence. I suppose, for that reason, my poems often read like mini autobiographies: This really happened—let me tell you about it. And so I try, in the telling, to find what music, pleasure, humor, play, paradox, pathos, wisdom or insight there is to be found, if any. So I start with a memory, and then I say to myself: Now just say what happened. Just tell it. Play with it. And in the telling/playing, and in trying to keep it short, interesting, human, accessible, compressed, compelling, incantatory (at least to me, while I’m making it, while I’m under the magic spell of it), sometimes I get a decent poem out of it. 

As for the poem “Discus,” I really did think I’d killed that guy when it happened. They really did let us check them out over the weekend and holidays, the way you check out a library book. You really do start with your back to where you’re going to throw it. I never saw him before and I never saw him again after it happened. Fortunately, the discus landed flat when it hit him on the head; if it had been the edge of the discus, it may well have killed him. And it really is mentioned in the Iliad during the funeral games for Patroclus outside Troy. And Mr. Rodewald was my professor’s real name. There’s nothing like the music of real names, I always say.

As for “Deciduous Teeth,” the poem was quite a bit longer before I pruned it down to its current length. My father died when I was a little kid. I don’t remember much, but I remember that he was in pain from the cancer. I remember he slept in a room by himself down the hall, because of the pain. The room became my room after he died. I remember he was often irritable and short-tempered because of the pain from the cancer, and he would yell at me for running or jumping or making too much noise, basically for being a little kid. My mother really did tell me she wished I had my father’s teeth. And I really did have fillings in many of my baby teeth when they fell out. And they really do call your baby teeth, or milk teeth, or primary teeth, your “deciduous teeth,” which I’ve always wanted to put into a poem.