1. Write what you’d like to read (not what you think they’ll publish).
2. Submit your poems to POETRY magazine at least once a year, even though your poems are rejected every single time. Do this out of respect because you also read POETRY magazine. Continue for 15 years.
3. Read and submit to other journals likewise. Same timeline.
4. Repeat steps two and three but with different results.
5. Using your published poems alone and without contacting one yourself, inspire a major author (preferably Sherman Alexie) to introduce himself via email, flatter you obsequiously, and offer to get you the attention of an editor at a publishing house (preferably W. W. Norton & Co.).
6. Book contracts are best paired with beer.
7. Repeat steps one and four indefinitely.

Note: Results may vary. Tastes are subjective. Timelines may differ. Beer selection process may begin prior to receipt of contract.

I am the poet in my family, and I’m glad I don’t have to deal with me.

I’m often asked what it’s like to write about my loved ones—about my wife and my parents in particular. I’m quick to point out that poetry has more to do with fiction than with fact. They might be based on my life experiences, but my poems are not wholly autobiographical.

Imagine you had a compulsive liar in your family who lied about you because he discovered other people found beauty in his lies. Or imagine you had a comedian in your family who used you as the butt of your jokes because he loved making people laugh. Imagine you had a pastor in your family who embroidered stories about you in order to inspire his parishioners.

The best lies have a little truth in them, and the best jokes have stingers. Good poems have truth and stingers, lies and jokes.

Poems about happy childhoods don’t tend to be very compelling; poems want something to rub up against. A good story has a conflict and complications. A good song has something to resolve.

A happy childhood is what I had, growing up on the farm between two kind and loving parents who challenged and inspired me, but you wouldn’t know that from my poems necessarily. My wife is thoughtful and warm-hearted and generous and amiable but my most compelling poems paint her otherwise. I write plenty of harmless, adoring poems about the people in my life, but editors don’t seem to want those, and so they tend never to see the light of day.

Poets know there’s a difference between the poet and what we call “the speaker” of a poem. Although the speaker might sound a lot like the poet, might even call his children by their real names, there is always a danger in asserting that the poem’s thoughts or emotions can be attributed as the poet’s own. They might have sprung, after all, from a particular moment or a dream or a conceptual project that has nothing to do with the people implicated.

It’s too bad nobody explains this to the people implicated. Of course, even if someone did, the people implicated would still come away feeling misrepresented, because … well, they are. Why do I misrepresent them? Usually because the poem isn’t really about them, it’s about me or an idea or an emotion or something that sometimes even I can’t explain. “Tell all the truth,” said Emily Dickinson, “but tell it slant.”

And so, dear readers: This disclaimer. My wife is not a raving lunatic, my mother isn’t trying to destroy our marriage, my father isn’t jealous of his brother, I didn’t grow up poor, and there was no ice on the roadway when the family piano went off the back of our pickup truck—heck, I’m told it wasn’t even wintertime (although that’s how I remember it)! My work is misrepresentation in the service of art. With a little representation thrown in.

And to my loved ones, a repeated apology: You give me love and I make you the butt of my jokes. You support me and I obliterate you with lies.

You encouraged the family poet. Sometimes, for your sakes, I wish you hadn’t.

Here’s a short lecture I gave to the University of Minnesota’s undergraduate creative writing sections last fall. It explores some of my thoughts about poetry as prayer, and relates those thoughts to my recent public art work, “Project 35W,” a collaboration with Swedish artist Maja Spasova. If you want a glimpse into my process or some thoughts about poetry’s role as public art, you might enjoy this presentation. Let me know what you think!

Support your local indie bookseller!

It’s been an interesting month. In our first-ever collaboration, Swedish artist Maja Spasova and I installed 35 giant rubber rings in the Mississippi in downtown Minneapolis, to mark the 5th anniversary of the 35W Bridge collapse. It was my first public art project, and a really scary thing to do. As a poet, I’m used to solitude, and when I publish my work it’s hardly an event that attracts attention. But this project would be seen by everyone on the riverfront in my home city of Minneapolis, for a whole month. I admit I had more than one sleepless night about this project. Would victims of the collapse be offended? Would the project get criticized in the media? Was it right for Maja and me to speak for the community this way?

Boy, were my eyes opened. Once the project was in the water, I saw how peaceful and inviting the project was. As Maja had promised, it had a meditative vibe that was calming, playful, and welcoming. Whenever I visited the project at its best viewing-spot (the historic Stone Arch Bridge) I saw people reading the signs we installed there, remarking to one another, dialing the number to hear the poems, and taking photos. I saw them pausing at the railing and thinking. Maja and I had caused them to pause and consider. It felt good.

And I must admit, it was a lot like writing a poem. Thirty-five oversized rings in the river. No explanation, no interpretation. What did it mean? What did Maja’s rings symbolize? How did they relate to the tragedy? Readers of the installation had to provide their own answers. The installation itself aspired to be nothing more than poetic, a gesture, an invitation.

The rings were tethered to 10-foot lengths of rope and anchored by cinder block. We installed the rings in the non-navigable “backwater” area of this busy working river, where the water was slower and shallower.

The rings stretched in a broad swath from the historic Stone Arch Bridge, downriver toward the reconstructed 35W Bridge, which you can see in the far distance in the photo above.

The Star Tribune supported the project by publishing all 35 of my related poems, “Fragments for the 35W Bridge” on the cover of the Variety section on August 1, 2012. You can read the poem and see the Star Tribune’s other contributions to this project here. The Star Tribune even hosted a “write your own 35-word poem” feature, and published many entries.

Signs informed viewers how to access the poems by phone, and by QR code.

One of Maja’s early drawings had rings below the Lower Falls and even downriver from the 35W Bridge. Navigation channels compromised this plan, but the final project was both more viewable and more gestural.

The rings came black, from the distributor (Countrywide Tire and Rubber), and had to be inflated, then painted, then transported, then installed. Here’s Maja in my front yard grass, painting. Countrywide even recycled the rings when the project was taken down on August 31, 2012.

The new 35W Bridge in the background, part of our installation in the foreground. Moonrise in the distance!

Two years after I started writing 35-word Fragments for the 35W Bridge, I’d gone and written nearly 35 of them. I didn’t know what I had: Was it any good? Would anybody care? I decided to share the project with two people whose opinion I trusted.

1. Maja Spasova

I had met Maja (pronounced MY-a) three years earlier at Ragdale, a retreat center in Chicago. In Europe, where she lives, Maja is known for large-scale public art projects. Ever since she’d seen the worldwide media coverage of the I-35W Bridge collapse, she’d been sending me drafts of ideas for big installations on the river. I thought my poems would be interesting to her, and sure enough … Soon plans were in place for a major public art installation to mark the collapse anniversary.

Maja’s concept was to anchor 35 oversized night-lit life-rings in the Mississippi between the historic Stone Arch Bridge and the new 35W Bridge. The result, she said, would be a contemplative meditation on safety and risk, change and stasis, disaster and salvation, the individual and the communal, power and fragility.

Photo credit: Mill City Times

Viewers of the installation would have access to recordings of my poems by calling a phone number, Maja said. In early 2012 during a visit to the site and with help from the Friends of the Hennepin County Library, Maja spent three days making recordings of Minnesotans telling their stories of the collapse and reading my poems in their own voices.

What followed was a 3-month roller coaster ride of writing, planning, and applying for permits from a host of government, military, and community institutions, including the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, the City of Minneapolis, The Historic Preservation Office, the US Coast Guard, the DNR, and more.

It was like an alien invasion. Inner tubes, donated by Countrywide Tire and Rubber in Plymouth, landed in my garage. Each day, my wife and kids inflated more and more of them till our house was surrounded. Paint was donated by Plasti Dip of Blaine. Friends began volunteering canoes and trailers. This thing was coming together.

My son Theo with inner tubes.

2. Laurie Hertzel / Connie Nelson / Kate Parry

Meanwhile, seeking advice about who might be willing to publish the poems, I sent them to Laurie Hertzel, books editor of the Star Tribune. She sent them to her editor, Connie Nelson, who sent it to her editor, Kate Parry, and before I knew it, the Star Tribune was planning to publish them. All of them. On the front cover of the Variety section. To the exclusion of other content. On the August 1 anniversary of the collapse.

My poem, Connie said, would allow the Star Tribune to mark this important anniversary with something poignant, thoughtful, personal, and artful. What an honor: to think my poem could be such an inspiration for art-making and community.

As of this writing, Maja is on her way to the US from London. When she gets here, we’ll continue to inflate and paint the rings, and oversee their installation in the slow-moving backwater area of the Mississippi near Hennepin Island Park, between upper and lower St. Anthony Falls, between the 35W and Stone Arch Bridges.

Connie is supervising the layout of the poem, the voice recordings and signage for the installation, as well as an online page where you’ll be invited to contribute your own 35-word poem about the collapse.

The project will go live on August 1, with an informal gathering at 8pm at the northeast end of the Stone Arch Bridge. No speeches, just interactions. Please come and meet Maja and Connie, see the installation, and toast the whole project.

When the 35W Bridge famously collapsed into the Mississippi River on August 1 2007, I was just pulling into my driveway in north suburban St. Paul, having commuted across the bridge 20 minutes earlier.

That’s not unusual: thousands of Minnesotans could say the same. After all, the bridge was, at the time, the 5th busiest in the state, freighting 145,000 vehicles a day.

Three years later, in 2010, I still had strong feelings about the collapse. I was angry. I was heartbroken about those who died. I still felt trepidation while crossing other bridges around town. I suffered a sense of betrayal.

And so I started writing about it. I wanted to explore my feelings individually, to take them apart the way the engineers took apart the fallen bridge and laid it on the banks of the big river in 2007. Like them, I wanted to inspect. I wanted to pinpoint weaknesses, identify stressors, compare theories. I didn’t want a big poem that would mean something to anyone else, necessarily. I just wanted to sort out my own jumble of feelings.

The collapse was such a big event, so I set myself a limit: Today I’d write a poem of 35 words, exploring just one aspect of my experience of the collapse; tomorrow I’d write another. Just 35 words. I thought maybe this arbitrary yet rigorous parameter might help me discipline my thoughts, give me new lenses to see with.

In a short poem, everything counts for more. Even the line-breaks. And that’s when I discovered that poems do their own collapsing: they drop down the page toward their inevitable endings, and leave you in empty space. Poems fall.

The eye is a physical part of the body; it moves through every word using muscle and ligament. Reading is a physical act.

And so I began to experiment with my little poems, turning them into miniature collapses, each a minor physical and engineering disaster. Six of them landed in my 2nd book of poems, Pitch. They’re all untitled. Here’s one:

Not

water

but

air’s

where

the

fallen

fall

first.

Not

landing,

but

numbing

to

the

fact

that

landing

is

coming,

is

the

worst

part

of

falling.

Not

losing

a

loved

one

but

calling

and

calling.

Ever since Anne Basye’s article about me in The Lutheran last October, I’ve wanted to share my poetry with congregations. Last month, Hervey Evans, a parishioner at Mount Olivet UCC in Saint Paul, who commissioned me to write a love poem to his wife a few years ago, invited me to spend an hour with his congregation.

It was a great hour. How refreshing it is to talk with people about faith, having neither to mince words nor suffer atheists! (Don’t get me wrong, I adore atheists, I find their reason-based approach to mystical issues totally hilarious.) It brought me back to my college days at Saint Olaf, where thoughtful debate about religious questions is commonplace. Nothing beats an honest, open-hearted conversation about the big mysteries that beguile us.

Hervey introduced me by (surprise) reading an article I forgot I’d written several years ago for the Best American Poetry blog. I read my poems and talked about my own limited conception of a creator god—the god of contradiction, whose world is in pencil—and the ongoing discussion was tremendous.

I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken with a more engaged, conscious, hard-thinking, or appreciative audience. Thanks, Mount Olivet, for keeping the spirit of spiritual inquiry alive!

At the annual conference of the Associated Writers and Writing Programs this year, I had the joy of encountering this beautiful 7 x 7 broadside of my poem, “Today It Seemed I Had Nothing to Say,” letterpress printed by Kerri Cushman with a woodcut by JJ Eisfelder in a numbered edition of 100. It was printed for me by the Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review where the poem, now collected in Pitch, first appeared.

Isn’t it handsome?

This broadside is SOLD OUT … I have 0 remaining.

The poem goes like this:

TODAY IT SEEMED I HAD NOTHING TO SAY

that hadn’t been said already—

my head full of moldy

hay and feelings

of futility—

until you asked me

what it was like, for a change,

to have no barred owl

brooding above the barn,

and so I went stealing again,

softly, softly

up the worn wood loft ladder,

hoping to startle up

a glimpse of something

that even now might heft

itself lightly through the mouth

of the mow, and drift just

out of view, off-levelly,

all hollow and feather pillow,

folding and unfolding

and folding itself silently into

the forest where its terrible

utility moves like a shudder

over every living thing.

This month I brushed up on my letterpress skills and took a beginners’ class at the Minnesota Center for Book Arts. The result is this edition of 40 broadsides. One can be yours for $20. Currently I have 10 remaining.

The poem, from my new book, Pitch, is called “Joke,” and it’s a spicy little zinger that runs like this:

JOKE

My mother used to say:

  Nobody was here today

  and she made dinner.

The joke was weird,

  for where was Nobody

  now, and where

the feast prepared?

Each broadside is signed and numbered on laid paper, and each is slightly unique. They’d look great professionally matted and framed. I’ll ship it to you rolled, in a mailing tube.

Want one?

Mail check payable to: Todd Boss, 38 North Oaks Road, Saint Paul, MN 55127.