Weapons Grade
Terese Svoboda

Weapons Grade suggests trouble. Where does the title come from?
Originally the title of a poem that didn’t make the book, Weapons Grade emerged as the top candidate because so many of the poems were explosive, then it re-submerged as the title of a new and not good new poem and finally appeared as a video game in the middle of the longest poem in the book about the occupation of Japan. Or about our culpability in this Cabaret-time we’re living in.

Who checks your work?
I don’t have a writing group for poetry. I wish I did. I still love some of the poems I wrote in the one I was involved with the 80’s. My previous four books of poetry only underwent copy editing. Although I had another offer, when Enid Shomer promised to work with me on Weapons Grade, I went with Arkansas. She was terrific.

Who let you take up writing?
Creative writing offered itself as an option to analyzing texts, which I found hard to do, as easily seduced I was with words. I never believed writers or artists pre-visualized the symbols or the interweavings or they’d never made their art in the first place. Art is all about energy, not exhaustion. Given permission, I wrote furiously in my youth and also painted, sculpted, and made movies. It was also the seventies when everyone was an artist. When the great wash of peers pulled back and it was revealed that they had secretly studied law or medicine, there I was, standing in the sand, still making art. I never questioned this stance and I was lucky to have had teachers who believed making art was as necessary as banking. However, my dad still wants me to sell real estate.

People accuse you of being prolific.
This is a term people use to avoid having to take the work seriously. No one says Paul Muldoon is prolific. I will admit to having published four novels (three more are scheduled), a memoir, a book of translations, and a libretto, as well as four other books of poetry, but the best of my work uses all the resources of language, regardless of genre.

The longest poem in the book is “Secret Executions of Blacks My Uncle Saw.” Does this poem have a basis in fact?
Last year I won Graywolf’s Nonfiction Award for Black Glasses Like Clark Kent, a memoir about my uncle who gave me tapes about being an MP in a postwar stockade in Japan and where his captain built a gallows for American GIs. I spent a number of years trying to find out what happened. Every book has its “extra scenes”—whatever they call it on movie CDs—and those coalesced into the poem.

Who is your favorite contemporary poet?
Maureen Seaton. Oh, I read and enjoy many more but she has the bite plus the play.Nobody works the edge of language the way she does. Paul Muldoon gives it a go too. I like dead poets too: Henri Michaux and Jules Supervielle remain the most disorienting, Auden the most orienting.

Do you write every day?
It’s a habit. You have to feed the habit. I’ve been very lucky to have unemployment this year. Can’t earn a sabbatical if you’re only a visitor.

What do you do with all the drafts?
I’m hoping someone will take them away and burn them. I can’t do it. All those trees. I have to print to see how to organize poems. The computer in my head can’t do it.

How does it feel to have poems published in the New Yorker, TLS and Poetry all in one year?
I’m an overnight success—that was my third poem in the New Yorker in 25 years, the last poem I had in Poetry was 35 years ago, and the editor at TLS died immediately after my poem ran. Pretty dangerous stuff. As long as I live for another fifty years, I’ll have obtained a certain four-generation notoriety, each time readers welcoming me as a new poet.

What are you working on now?
I have a whole stack of poems written in the excitement of editing this manuscript that is coalescing, hopeful of their reception in that timeless arena of readers hungry for the news that stays news. How they will read it is another matter entirely.