How has your relationship to poetry developed from when you first began to write, to now? 

I started as a short story writer, so when I first began to write poems, I had to learn how to omit unnecessary background and description from my verse—how to allow poetic devices such as imagery, metaphor, sound, tone, and voice stand on their own. In searching for models, I found that I was drawn to concision and brevity, so the poets who first inspired me—and inspire me still—are poets such as Ted Kooser, Robert Francis, and Linda Pastan. I love the wit and word play, the startling metaphors these poets come up with—how vividly they paint a picture or tell a story in just a few lines.

Can you describe your creative process when writing poetry? 

I keep a small notebook and jot down things I glimpse while walking or driving, such as an abandoned armchair on the Turnpike, or a statue being hosed down before a religious holiday. In the initial writing of a poem, I avoid trying to do too much. I simply jot down my impressions, paying particular attention to little details, turns of phrase, metaphors I might explore. I try to get a sense of where the poem wants to take me. Once I have these things sketched out, the real work comes in. During the next days I’ll search for a good opening, a strong organizing principle that will help the poem move gracefully from beginning to end. I have tremendous patience for revision. It’s the initial writing I sometimes want to avoid, though sketching from a notebook helps ease me into the writing process.

In your poem “Root Vegetable Soup,” you capture the beauty of a more mundane moment so effectively. How do you think poetry is a useful vehicle when capturing the loveliness of quiet moments?   

Poetry forces us to be attentive to those quiet, unheralded moments around us. Our lives are mostly filled with routines, ordinary events. Why not celebrate them? In my poems I try to make the ordinary (a father’s making school lunches, a son’s teaching a father the rudiments of disc golf) stand out—or show their extraordinariness in some way. In my verse I try to paint a picture or tell a little story so that readers might feel a connection with the day-to-day events in their own lives.

In your other poems, you often use imagery to bring to life a simple scene at a grocery store, or at a little league baseball game. Why do you think you tend to gravitate towards these simpler settings in your poetry?

The house and yard, the neighborhood, the office, the ballfield—I know these settings best, and that is probably why I write so frequently about them. Even in my reading—in poems and stories—I am drawn to the common life, how people navigate their way in family relationships and on the job. A challenge I set out for myself is to find words—an image, a metaphor—that will put a shine on something old and familiar so it can be viewed in a new way.

Do you often pull from your personal experiences when writing poetry? If so, what is it about poetry that compels you to do so?

Drawing from my personal experiences is a way of taking pictures, of documenting the events in my life—or, to paraphrase a fellow poet, to keep the people and things in my life from disappearing, if only for a while. For example, I wrote a poem recently about my family’s old green sofa. My wife and I bought this piece of furniture from a department store more than thirty years ago—the first new couch or chair or table we had ever owned. Years later, when we finally decided to replace it, we called a hauling company to take it away. Just minutes before the company arrived (a pair of young guys in backwards caps), my grown daughter and I sat on it for the very last time. It seemed that our old couch that had served us so well—through birthday parties and graduations, through all the mundane events of our lives—deserved a tribute before it got carted off to a landfill somewhere. Most of us can relate to such an ordinary experience, I think—the removal of old furniture or an old car. The trick, I guess, is to recount the experience without slipping into sentimentality—to affect the right tone, to have the right blend of humor and pathos.

If you could have readers take away one message from “Root Vegetable Soup and your poetry as a whole, what would it be?

To pay attention to the quiet, seemingly insignificant moments that make up a life—perhaps every person’s life. In my view, nothing is too slight to escape our notice.

Read Joseph’s poem, “Root Vegetable Soup” in dulcet Literary magazine, vol. One, Issue No. 2, coming this february.