Scott's Commentary
One of the joys of writing poetry no one told me about when I first began is the pleasure of going back and rediscovering your own lines and creative impulses. In the case of “Pasture Fire,” I had completely forgotten the poem’s genesis until I dug up its first draft. James Knippen, a poet buddy of mine down in Texas, had a line that I riffed on after one of our impromptu workshop sessions: “Our real words should / be as flammable as these.” At the time I was working on several persona poems in the voices of Texas wildflowers, doing my best to channel Louise Glück’s persona work in The Wild Iris while also maintaining my own aesthetic sensibility, which is closely tied to the rural Texas landscapes where I grew up.
As you can tell from the earliest draft, I was obsessed with the vocabulary of burning things (e.g., “conflagration,” “sun,” “glint,” “reflect,” “ash”) and still am as a result of wildfires and a decade-long drought that continues to shape much of my own internal landscape. If you drive alongside pastures that are burned black on a regular basis as a child, those scenes enter your imagination and remain in you for good—which “Pasture Fire” evidences, certainly.
The clipped lines of later drafts of the poem were an attempt to emulate fire’s brevity and puncturing capacity down the page, though I was also thinking about the idea of erasure itself and how to physically account for it.
That didn’t happen in a pleasurable, “final” way until the last draft, which I almost didn’t write. When The Winter Tangerine Review asked for a poem last year, I sent in the 9/15/13 draft of “Pasture Fire” and had it rejected. I remember thinking, These editors are in high school. Who do they think they are, rejecting me?
But then, of course, that rejection was a fortunate thing. The poem had to wait to continue getting born. And it finally did—in large part due to that late-stage no. Yusef Komunyakaa also played a crucial role in making this poem better. He taught me to key in on the linkages between internal and external landscapes at a metaphysical level in my own psyche, and kept challenging me to make this particular poem better throughout the time he taught me by letting its meaning and message rise out of its own vocabulary and the erased, negative Texas landscape it attempts to praise.