As poetry editors at Bear Review, each year there’s really no greater joy than informing a poet that their anonymous contest entry hasn’t only won us over, but that it has also floored our judge, who is always one of the most dynamic poets writing in English.
This year’s judge was Traci Brimhall, who contributed to an early issue of the journal. After choosing the prize-winner and runner-up, Brimhall named three poems as finalists for publication in Volume 9, Issue 2. These poems, after we revealed the identities of the poets, were written by Genevieve DeGuzman of Portland, OR; Skye Jackson of New Orleans, LA; and Jennifer Makaato of Abbeville, MS.
As serious poets ourselves, we are always—as you probably are—interested in knowing a poet’s general process. Curious to learn how the poet generated such a phenomenal poem, and how this piece fits with the other poems in their manuscript taking shape, we reached out to each finalist with these questions:
Genevieve DeGuzman
Genevieve DeGuzman writes poetry and fiction. She has been a recipient of fellowships and grants from the Oregon Arts Commission, PEN America, Literary Arts, and Vermont Studio Center, among others. As a poet, Genevieve won the Atticus Review contest selected by Roberto Carlos Garcia and earned nominations for the Best New Poets anthology. Her work appears in Folio, Iron Horse Literary Review, Nimrod, RHINO, phoebe, Strange Horizons, and has been featured in the Poetry Moves program for C-TRAN in Washington state. Born in the Philippines, raised in Southern California, she now lives in Portland, OR. She tweets at @gen_deg.
Bear Review: Can you tell us the story of your Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Finalist poem, “Blue”? What experiences did it grow from? Who or what inspired it? What was it like to write and revise it?
Geneivieve DeGuzman: “Blue” originated during a residency at Vermont Studio Center. Residents, both writers and visual artists, were assigned work studios during our month. While writers were essentially working in quaint, comfy office spaces, the artists, who ranged from sculptors, material and fiber artists, and painters, worked in cavernous studios full of arcane equipment. As a writer with just a laptop and a few dictionaries and books at my disposal, I marveled at those other spaces filled with lathes, foundries, presses, plaster, paint, wall-sized canvases, textiles. We writers live/work largely in our heads and with intangibles, while our counterparts deal with hands-on, more physical, and by default, more directly sensual, sensory processes. From my conversations with people, I became obsessed with color, particularly the color blue. An artist there told me blue can be the hardest, most nuanced color to render. It also rarely exists in nature, and I know some languages don’t even have a true word for blue. As a writer, the nature of obsession is interesting to me. It involves desire but also the denial or thwarting of that desire. From there, a narrative evolved about a relationship doomed and ending and soon the imagery followed—all drawn from personal experiences I had during my stay. BR: Does this piece come from a manuscript of related poems? If so, what work do you see it doing as you’ve put it in play with them? If not, how do you see each poem you write and “keep” in relation to those you’ve already written and those you’ve yet to write? “Blue” will be part of a collection I’ve been working on around themes of yearning, loss, and womanhood. BR: Can you tell our readers about your process for making a poem? GD: My process for writing poetry has changed over the years as I write less on paper and more on the screen, whether on my laptop or on my phone. It essentially means that writing and revising happen all at once. I may work on a line before moving on to the next one, doubling back to the beginning before making it to the end. This way of writing is more spontaneous but less intentional. I sometimes don’t know where I’m going with a poem until it’s completed! This can appear chaotic but this mode feels closer to how our thoughts work, how they are always in flux. When I finally arrive at a first, complete draft, it’s already a layered cake of revision. Finally, I try to use time to revise my poems. I’ll let a poem simmer for weeks, sometimes months even years, before calling it, letting it age and ferment. Because I know a poem never stays the same for me. It hits differently every time I re-read it. That fickle, magical alchemy is why I love poetry.
Skye Jackson
Skye Jackson was born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, Electric Literature, Green Mountains Review, RATTLE and elsewhere. Her chapbook A Faster Grave won the 2019 Antenna Prize. Her work has been a finalist for the RATTLE Prize, the RHINO Founders' Prize, and in 2021 she received the AWP Intro Journals Award and was twice nominated for Best New Poets. Skye's work was selected by Billy Collins for inclusion in the Library of Congress Poetry 180 Project. In 2022, she won the KGB Open Mic Contest in New York City, and served as the Writer-In-Residence at the Key West Literary Seminar in Florida.
Bear Review: Can you tell us the story of your Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Finalist poem, “Libre”? What experiences did it grow from? Who or what inspired it? What was it like to write and revise it?
Skye Jackson: I wrote this poem based on an experience I had when I did a writing residency in Key West, Florida. Key West is a rather mystical city…where it feels like anything can happen at any moment. I don’t like to explain my work…I feel strongly about leaving that up to readers. But what I will say is that I believe this work reflects some of the challenges that Black people find themselves facing in America. Because of this, I wanted to find the proper “container” for the subjects that are discussed in the work. I have been a fan of Claudia Rankine and the way that she writes prose poetry. The topics spoken about in the poem are some that she sometimes explores…so I thought about composing the piece in the way that she often does. That is why it is dedicated to Rankine. Writing and revising the poem was very difficult. I sometimes still wonder if it is actually complete! There was so much that was moved around or just removed entirely!
BR: Does this piece come from a manuscript of related poems? If so, what work do you see it doing as you’ve put it in play with them? If not, how do you see each poem you write and “keep” in relation to those you’ve already written and those you’ve yet to write?
SJ: It does. It is one of the poems from my forthcoming debut manuscript, which is also called Libre. I love this poem because it adds some variety to the manuscript. But it also reflects the most important themes of the manuscript: race and the way we are sometimes forced to interact with each other in this world. I think that each poem is almost like just adding another brushstroke to a canvas…it makes the manuscript, as a whole, more rich, vivid and textured.
BR: Can you tell our readers about your process for making a poem?
SJ: Sometimes I’ll have an experience and then I’ll make a note that I’d like to write a poem about that experience at a later time. Most of the time, the best way I can describe my process is that I wait to be “activated.” Once that activation happens, the poem just pours out of me. It’s a very curious feeling…my mind and heart both just fill up with the poem. Then I’ll have to scramble for a pen or the notes app on my phone so that I can catch everything that’s falling out of me in that moment. After I do that, I wait a little bit and then type it up…and of course, continue to revise accordingly.
Jennifer Maaketo
Jenny Maaketo (she/her) is a neurodivergent poet, psychiatric nurse, and former professional actor. She was born, raised, and misses her hometown of Austin, Texas dearly. Ms. Keto is a first-year poetry candidate in the MFA Creative Writing program at the University of Mississippi. Her poem "The Reason I Keep my Questions Between Dark and Dark" was recently awarded runner-up in the 2022 Patty Friedmann Writing Competition with a forthcoming publication in The Peauxdunque Review. Her other poems appear or are forthcoming in The Madison Review, Ponder Review, Gris-Gris, Cathexis Northwest Press, Host Publications, and Francis House among others. She lives in Abbeville, Mississippi on some untouched land with her husband, three dogs, two cats, and lots of love.
Bear Review: Can you tell us the story of your Michelle Boisseau Poetry Prize Finalist poem, “Another Month, Another Red Question”? What experiences did it grow from? Who or what inspired it? What was it like to write and revise it?
Jennifer Maaketo: As fate or God or chance would have it, many of my life goals converged within the span of a few years. In the spring of 2021, I met my husband-to-be. Matt proposed to me the next year at The Dallas Zoo on my 38th birthday. That same spring, I accepted the offer of a fully funded candidacy for poetry in the MFA creative writing department at the University of Mississippi. Matt and I were in a place in our lives as well as our relationship where we knew we wanted to buy a home together. We were in the process of selling Matt’s condo when I got the call from Beth Ann Fennelly with the news of a place for me in the fall 2022 cohort. Matt has always wanted to “live off the land” as he says, so with the sale of his home, we were able to buy a 66-acre homestead just 15 minutes outside of Oxford, MS. After my first semester of grad school, Matt and I married on December 18th, 2022, with an intimate ceremony back in our hometown of Austin, Texas.
My husband and I are both almost 40. We became a couple at 37, and though Matt and I didn’t want to rush enjoying the first years of our relationship, we knew we wanted to have a family together. The research articles and testimonials about infertility that abound on social media only serve to heighten potential anxiety. With every passing year, a woman in middle age can begin to feel as if her waning fertility could be measured with time kept by an hourglass. Even with the reassurance of fertility testing, I wondered just how many grains of sand I had left in the glass before it was too late to conceive naturally. Not knowing what would be in store for our fertility story, Matt and I didn’t want to wait until after I finished my MFA to begin trying to conceive.
There I was in my first semester as a grad student at UM, reacclimating myself to higher education after many years away from the rigors of academic life, in my first graduate-level poetry workshop, juggling my duties as a T.A., taking my first literature classes since high school, all while quietly trying to get pregnant. “Another Month, Another Red Question” grew from this anxiety over potential difficulties with conception. I wrote the first draft by hand in my journal, as is my habit, one morning while enjoying tea on our front porch, sitting, rocking in the rustic rocking chair Matt and I just bought, and surveying the natural landscape we newly called home. My period had just come, and I wondered how many more months of blood would have to come before I would be pregnant.
This was what occupied my mind when I began to write my lines that morning. Throughout my life, I’ve found nature to be a welcome escape from what overwhelms and challenges me emotionally. With this escape, comes unexpected answers to some of my most pressing questions, answers spoken in the wild breath of unknown when one is open only to their senses.
It’s funny, being an older, non-traditional grad student in a cohort with fellow poets who are mostly in their early to mid-twenties, a poem that to me was clearly about the unknown before conception, was less than clear to my peers upon a first read. It’s safe for me to assume that attempting to conceive was not an endeavor that had yet entered the headspace of any others in my cohort. As a result, my subsequent edits entailed making the anticipation of conception more obvious in my metaphors and imagery.
BR: Does this piece come from a manuscript of related poems? If so, what work do you see it doing as you’ve put it in play with them? If not, how do you see each poem you write and “keep” in relation to those you’ve already written and those you’ve yet to write?
JM: My current book project encompasses themes of mental illness that stem from personal experiences growing up in a family system with a parent who still suffers from a chronic mental illness, as well as my time as a psychiatric nurse caring for thought disorder patients in the psych ICU of an acute psychiatric hospital.
I’m not sure “Another Month, Another Red Question” fits into this manuscript, but (spoiler alert), as I’m currently pregnant, I anticipate this poem fitting quite nicely at the beginning of my next book of poems. I’m the type of poet who writes directly from their personal life. I see this poem marking a new chapter, or in a poet’s case, a new chapbook of my life. I’ll be taking a leave of absence from my MFA program to focus on my new role as a mother. I expect by the end of my leave, I’ll have many more poems for a collection about all the firsts of motherhood and infancy.
BR: Can you tell our readers about your process for making a poem?
JM: I’m a firm believer in the unnamed, unknown source of creative inspiration. My process begins with the liminal space we poets manifest with silence, solitude, unbridled time, and the blank page. As a connoisseur of fountain pens and bound journals, I know that for me, there’s a direct link between the kinesthetic process of writing by hand and my access to the creative impulse. Sometimes I come to the page with a thematic and/or form-informed intention, but most of the time, I come to the page without knowing what the creative source will give me at any given moment. That kind of surprise is what I love about the unpredictability of creativity.
My next step involves returning to my journal with a discerning eye and determining what first drafts are worth a second edit. Those poems deemed worthy enough are typed into my laptop. From there, I return to the Word document again and again. For me, the editing process often involves countless iterations of adding, cutting, tweaking, and rearranging lines, finessing line breaks, and agonizing over the title, beginning, and ending, until by my gut, I feel a poem may be ready to find a home with publication.
Even during the submission period, with every new round of submissions, I find myself continuing to tinker with a poem. It’s rare for a poem to retire from its tenure with editing, even after it is published. When I minored in playwriting as an undergraduate, my mentor Suzan Zeder taught me early on that 99% of writing is in the endlessness of editing.
