Why did you write The Second Blush?

I started off asking myself this question: Is a contemporary married love poem a contradiction in terms? When you open an anthology of love poetry, is there even a section for poems of long-term love? (Wait, I think I saw a couple of pages tucked in just before the huge section of divorce poems . . .) I wrote The Second Blush, my sixth collection of poems, in response to that contradiction, and in the hopes of adding a few more pages to that slender section in the love poetry anthology. I wanted the poems to be quirky, affectionate, unpredictable, and reflective of the deep, complex emotional undertones in a marriage — all leavened with humour, and all structured with the ghost of the love sonnet.


Is there a secret narrative in The Second Blush?

Yes, there’s a backdrop of a story that seeps through the sequence of poems. The Second Blush is underpinned by the almost novel-like arc of my relationship with my husband. We met in our teens, were boyfriend and girlfriend from our last two years of high school through our first year at university. We broke up, didn’t hear about one another for nineteen years, then re-united in midlife. (I tell this story in greater detail in my memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece.) The poems in The Second Blush take as their starting point my husband’s survival from a health crisis, and they address the contradictory ideas of planning for the future along with the urgency to make the present brilliantly alive. The succeeding poems celebrate marriage and what I call “the two-track life,” that is, the contradiction of both living in the moment AND planning for the future.


How did you write The Second Blush?

The poems came in response to an assignment I gave myself: try for 14 lines and a single image in each poem. Make each poem focus on a single image, like a cup, or a paperclip, or a blanket, or a carpet, or an artichoke. Sometimes I really did write 14 lines, and a live, contemporary sonnet to boot, such as in “Good Fortune” or “Gargoyle” or “The Rescuer.” Other times, 14 turned into 20, such as in “The Cup.” Coming up with a single image for each poem turned out to be equally hard. Multiple images crowded my imagination, though sometimes I put them through a mental strainer and came up with just one that I could revisit in the poem, making it a kind of metaphysical verse. Every once in a while I met both requirements, and those are the little miracles of the book, for me. I think particularly of “Marriage,” where my focus on the image of the pond let me understand the growth of our relationship. Giving myself the assignment let me complete the book, since I wrote it in between rehearsals and performances of my one-woman show in poems, The Shimmering Verge, directed by Louise Fagan. The show began in London, Ontario, and three years later had an Off-Broadway showcase in New York. All during that time I was doing my self-addressed assignment.


Did the process of writing any of these poems surprise you?

The surprise of these poems, for me, was how many of them had to do with mistakes: making them, living with them, being afraid of them, surviving them. The book ends with “The Flaw,” a poem that views flaws as necessary — and rescuing. My husband has survived a life-threatening illness, and he has a steady but casual embrace of life that comes, I think, from knowing he might have left it. He’s serene about the everyday detritus of things that go awry. Not me! The seesawing back and forth between his calmness and my quick, emotive reactions is also a big part of this book. As well as “The Flaw,” I think of “The Cliffs of Mistake,” “The Cup,” “Pink Paperclip,” “Confession,” and “In the Winter Dark.”


How does time of day affect the poem? Many of these poems take place at night.

I’m not a great sleeper, and I spend part of every night in a slightly wakened state. My parents fought throughout my childhood, waking me up. When I decided to concentrate on a single image for each poem, I let other images leach through the poem, just as dream images leach through into waking life, or anxiety leaches through sleep to wake us in the night. As thoughts about my parents’ marriage came to me, I allowed them in. You see, I didn’t have a ready model of a happy marriage — I had to imagine one. And one of the great gifts of my life is that imagining a happy marriage allowed me to have one. But the underpinnings of the past can be re-evoked very easily, especially by travel. I wrote part of this book in Dublin, Ireland. “The Match” and “Blasphemy and Blame” were inspired by moments in Dublin that recalled the anger of my parents. But another poem in the book, “Quick Kiss,” is also inspired by an Irish moment and a kind of fairy-tale image. “The Match” is definitely a nighttime anxiety poem, but “Quick Kiss” is about waking into what it’s possible to make and to have, despite the past.


You are a poet of technique. Can you tell us a little bit about the technique in The Second Blush?

For me, technique ties me to a literary family. You can’t pick your family, but you can pick your literary ancestors. I love the sonnets of writers from Queen Elizabeth I to John Donne, John Keats, Christina Rossetti and Edna St. Vincent Millay. Technique lets you focus on structure while your oceanic emotions roil. It’s like being in a little rowboat that’s going to get you across a stormy ocean. And it’s fun. The opening poem, “Of Night,” is both a sonnet and a version of a ghazal. I love challenges to myself, like ending every line in the same word. I tried a different version of this in the strange-looking poem, “The Happy Diary,” which tries to imitate a diary page. I actually kept a happy diary for a period of time. It was a great consolation. But I don’t believe in letting the formal technique strangle the poem. I think of structure as scaffolding to get to the emotional essence of an experience. That’s why I have several fifteen-line sonnets in the book. I call them “good enough sonnets.”

There are other formal poems in the book. “Ghost Cat” is an acrostic. “Our Waking” is a villanelle. “The Garden Giraffes” is a heroic sonnet.


Cats?? Isn’t a poet only allowed one cat poem every other book?

Yes, this books risks four cat poems — I’ve used up my allotment for the next eight books! It turned out that the feline world paralleled the married world in affecting ways. “Widow,” “Fellini the Cat,” and “Ghost Cat” work with the tension of living and dying, but funnel that tension into the relationship between a human and an animal. “Our Minor Art,” a poem about making love while the cats are on the bed, shows how humour is just part of sex in a long-term relationship — something else I rarely see in a poem but know that many of us experience all the time.


Tell us about those artichokes on the cover of the book.

I was shocked when I first saw those artichokes, because the one poem in the book about another love relationship — with Mr. Wrong — is called “Artichoke Heart.” Yikes! But as I re-read the poem in the context of those two artichokes, nose to nose, on the cover of this book, I saw the cooking of the artichokes as a present triumph over the past, and I see my marriage that way, and I hope that the poems in the book which partake of this aspect of marriage signal this feeling of mild victory. Are those long-married artichokes? Still alive, still green, with a bit of a blush around the tips?


Did you have a specific readership in mind when you wrote The Second Blush?

When I imagine my audience, I think of someone up late at night looking for the consolation of a like mind and picking my book off the shelf. In two poems, “Confession,” and “The Blanket,” I actually address the reader. It’s an old convention, but one I feel is important now as poets seem to be more distant from readers. Both of those poems address the complicated issue of how the life of the writer translates into art. “The Blanket,” in particular, is very important to me.
  

What about those strange, surreal images?

Oh, the surreal is just part of everyday perception for me. “Vision in the Backseat of a Taxi” is actually four visions. The cow-woman watering the flo1wers on her balcony in “Pedicure” is a vision of the past and the present, as the husband in the poem becomes a lesson to the wife. For me, surreal images are simply part of living my life as a poet. They are always present, uniting the disparities of life.


Can you describe your ideal writing environment?
 
My own desk (which is my grandmother’s dining room table) with an orchid in bloom and a view of downtown Toronto in the early morning.


If you had to choose a book as a “Welcome to Canadian Poetry” gift, what would that book be?

The Best Canadian Poetry in English 2008. This will give a newcomer to Canadian poetry a fabulous sense of the poetry being written and published across the country. I’m the General Series Editor, but I don’t choose the poems, so I feel I can sing its praises and recommend it.


What’s the best advice you’ve ever received as a writer?

The poet, translator and critic Richard Howard asked me, as a graduate student, “So what are you going to do when all your roiling emotion and passion runs out, Molly Peacock?” I thought, privately, It’ll never run out! But I was plagued by his question. Just in case it does, I asked myself, Why not be prepared? Why not investigate structure? That was when I started to teach myself to write sonnets.
 
 
What advice do you have for poets who are trying to get published?

Be persistent. I’m a student of poets’ careers, and the one single thing I find they all have in common is that they persisted in sending our their poems when they were emerging poets. And about rejection: don’t believe the advice that tells you to grow a thick skin to protect yourself. If you’re a poet, you have a thin skin. Period. That thin membrane between you and the world lets you write. So of course you’re going to be hurt by rejection. But that doesn’t mean you can’t feel wounded for 48 hours (that’s about how long it takes me) and then persist again.

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