Dan Wiencek lives in Portland, Oregon, and his work has appeared in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Sou’wester, New Ohio Review, Timberline Review and other publications. His first collection of poems, Routes Between Raindrops, was published in 2021. His poem “This Is Not a Story About Me” appears in the Summer 2022 issue of Carve.

What I enjoy most about your piece is that we’re always on the move, from one image or setting to the next. How do you find the journey of a poem? Of this poem? 

I do like your way of phrasing it: the journey of a poem. Writing poems for me is often an opportunity to let some interesting energies loose on a page and see what they do and where they lead me. Alongside that, I think of poems as a sort of dance between tension and resolution, where some images or ideas seem to raise the stakes while others provide a release or otherwise alter whatever dynamic is at play. A good poem is attentive to that process, and when people talk about a poem in terms of “flow” or how it moves, I think that’s what they’re reacting to.

In getting this piece into shape, the goal was to give the reader everything they needed to assemble the scene in their mind without providing too much. It’s painted broadly enough that, I think, you could ask many different readers to draw or describe it and everyone’s answer would be pretty different, barring a few commonalities. I’m a great believer that with the right details, you can “sell” the reader on anything. Some people have described my work as surreal (I couldn’t say whether this piece is or not), but the process of writing realism or surrealism is the same: present the right details so that the reality you’re portraying is convincing or at least compelling, which then encourages the reader to invest in the poem.

Your images are so clear, each one carrying their own spark, leading to the punch of the final line. What was the impetus for this poem? 

In Portland, Oregon, where I live, there were weeks and weeks of demonstrations, protests, vandalism and authoritarian violence in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in 2020. While that’s not a subject I feel capable of addressing directly, it weighed on me a great deal, this feeling that the world was convulsing while making its way toward, hopefully, some kind of collective awakening and improvement. So, my work at that time became infused with suggestions of clashing and strife, of places left scarred by struggle. At times, my brain being what it is, this expressed itself in a kind of comic absurdism — the parade in this poem is a funhouse-mirror image of a street protest, though in this case it’s not clear what’s actually being celebrated. Beyond that, the piece arises out of dreams I occasionally have of being out at night in some remote place, far from anywhere I know. Something about the opening images tapped into that dream-memory, and so the speaker finds himself at the ocean, in a sense having run out of places to go.

For such a short piece, every single word works to build the world of the poem. What was your revision process like? 

This poem came out of a long series of short stanzas I wrote, most of which ended up having nothing to do with each other. The first stanza of this poem was one of those. I pulled it out to make it its own piece and the second stanza at the ocean seemed a natural progression from the first. The early drafts of the complete piece were very prose-like, reading almost like a diary entry, with fewer but longer lines. I brought the piece to my writers’ group here in Portland and their feedback led me to reshape it the way it appears here. Very few of the actual words ended up being changed; it was really just figuring out the pace and shape of the poem. The early drafts also had conventional punctuation, which I removed. The logical relation between the lines then becomes more ambiguous, which gives the reader a greater role in assembling the poem’s meaning.

For you, what is the goal of sharing a poem? 

I don’t write poems to change the world — I wouldn’t know where to begin — but I can, perhaps, give back to readers something of what other poets give to me. I love reading a poem and being struck by an image, a phrase or an idea that feels new yet recognizable, that expands my mental vocabulary of possibilities. 

I know people who write solely for their own satisfaction, never attempting to share their work with a wider public, but for me, that feels incomplete. I want my poetry to find its way to the readers who will appreciate it, but more fundamentally, I want it to fully exist. That’s not to say I try to publish every poem I write; some of them just don’t feel like they make the cut. But just like Schrodinger’s cat is hypothetical until someone opens up the box, my poems are only possibilities until they emerge into a world of substance. Publishing entails a certain level of finality — I may not fully know my own intentions in writing something, but I ought to have at least a pretty good idea if I’m going to ask others to spend their time reading it. That extra step feels important, a way of holding myself accountable as an artist.