“It is difficult to talk about process without being trite.”

It is difficult to talk about process without being trite. To describe what it means to process, that would spoil the surprise. Reveal the trick. Cleave lightning from the bottle. In the process of editing, I began feeling it was more akin to excavating that which existed in the pieces beforehand as opposed to extracting or culling.

For this open call, I found myself drawn to poetry, the way poets take stock of the world and choose to reckon with it by drawing attention to negative space.

In the process of reviewing submissions, I considered the ability to inspire, trying to find work that not only stands on its own but is ripe with questions. Angelica Esquivel, Dani Oliver, and Owen Torrey all sent in work that makes one want to write. To quote Angelica’s poem “Opus”: to “try to record everything, or at least everything’s shadow.”

As we prepared their work for publication in the magazine, I asked them some brief questions over email about their process, what drew them to this open call, and their thoughts on the way their work interacted:

Theodore Heil (APS): What drew you to the open call and the notion of "process"?

Angelica Esquivel: I was specifically drawn to the phrase “in/through/of,” because it offered a uniquely immersive, textured way of looking at process, one that I hadn’t previously considered. It also intrigued me because it seemed to match well with a few poems I’d recently written that directly addressed the notion of process and what it means to create something.

Dani Oliver: I'm sort of turned off by what we often mean when we talk earnestly about "process," maybe precisely for the reasoning that runs through both of my poems here: the creative process (to me) is something impossible to capture, discuss, portray without either completely bastardizing it, flattening it, making it sound like a joke, minimizing its importance, or—worse!—elevating it to a place of veneration or significance that leaves poets discussing poetry in poetry magazines while everyone else around us makes dinner and loves each other, completely wholly satisfied without the dread and impulse to elevate process to a sacred, significant thing. Even metaphor can't release us from this trap. And yet. I've spent pages and pages of my life trying to explain what we lose through the attempt, the process—and lamenting the divide between what's real, what should actually be created on the page (if life were fair), and what can exist on the page. What drew me to this open call and its description is that, happily, it seemed open to the examination of this rather frustrating, stupid space in between.

Owen Torrey: I'm interested in the notion of "process" as it describes the labor behind a poem, as well as, more broadly, inscribes an ethic for how poems might resist fixity even in their "final" form. I think a lot about Anne Carson's description of poetry (metaphor, specifically) allowing "the mind to experience itself in the act of making a mistake," and am interested in the way poems allow for the on-going work of re-vision—through which what is at first seen or understood is amended into a different way of seeing, of understanding. I'd been writing some poems that circled around this idea in various ways, that tried to double back and ask the reader to think and then think again, and was excited by the open call's invitation to explore these questions of irresolution on the page.

APS: How did you feel your poems related to process? I am particularly interested in any ideas you may have around the act of writing and revising—do you find yourself writing in different ways? Across different registers? Is process something you consider when you're writing?

DO: Some of my favorite poems revise themselves in real time—which is a glorious form to read. I don't necessarily do that in these two, but I do think they both operate as pleas to their readers to understand the devastation of creative failure. Of feeling inept and still having the need to try for communication anyway. I'm one of those writers who thinks they can hear the poem before it exists (I know, yuck, sorry), and that my job is to sort of dictate what I hear. Which means the poem kind of chooses the path—and if I deviate sonically from its destination, I'm in effect starting a different poem altogether. I don't typically revise across different registers for this same reason, but I do play with pace and texture to get closer to the sense of the thing, like I assume we all do.

OT: I'd say that "S/Z" is the slightly more outward-facing of the two poems in its attention to process, trying to find various analogs between the shifting nature of literary form and the revision of physical matter in the world—the changes of crops throughout their growth cycle, the way a body alters over time. "Terms of Service" is more turned in on itself—using literature to describe the workings of literature—and considers process through setting down a list of "rules" for the workings of the novel form, while also insisting that contradiction and impossibility will always be part of these demands.

AE: “Meta Poetica” is interested in the act of writing poetry, but it’s also interested in the act of creation in a broader sense, and what it means to be a human making things. It is rather curious, how we continually produce these artifacts as a way of carrying ourselves through life. I think that even as we try to capture our internal and external experiences, there is always something that is lost, unable to be rendered on the page, but I also think it’s funny and beautiful that we keep trying despite the futility of the exercise.

APS: How do you feel your poems interact with the other poets in the portfolio? I noticed that everyone ends with these great images, what I have been referring to as your "fingerprints." Were any of the poems surprising?

OT: Such amazing poems! It was cool to see some recurrence in specific images—the mirror, in "Meta-Poetica," with its question "which is the base reflection?" that gets so wonderfully at the movement between art and life, original and replica, self and other, that I realize I was thinking about in "S/Z," too. And I hear across all our poems, though especially in "Idiolect," an awareness of the failure and gaps and lapse in language's transmission. Part of any attention to literary process seems to be about reckoning with the fact that, as you put it Angelica, there's always something "lost, unable to be rendered on the page."

AE: I was pleasantly surprised by how all of our poems in some way speak to the limitations of language and poetic exploration. It’s also funny how we immediately turn to metaphor when given the task of examining our process, using poetry to describe poetry. The use of repetition in both “Terms of Service” and “Idiolect” (with the string of questions) drew me in, as it pointed to a kind of relentlessness in messaging-–both in the messaging we consume as well as the messaging we create.

DO: All these poems are standing in the same circle at a party! And it's real nice to read them all together. Reading "S / Z" feels like listening to a more capable, grounded version of the argument that appears in my own poems, and "I remember to record / everything, or at least everything’s shadow" at the end of "Opus" certainly runs in parallel to what I try and fail to get at in my own work.