This week we’re featuring three poems by Maryann Corbett. Poetry editor Anna Lena Phillips asked for her thoughts on the poems and on the writing life; she shares them here.  Please share your own thoughts about the poems in the comments section below.

“Art Song’s Chicken Wings” makes such a great conceit for “Stream.” How did the idea for the poem come to you?

Utter serendipity and plain fact. There really was, for many years, a billboard right near one of the entrance ramps to Interstate 94 that advertised for a local Asian restaurant whose proprietor’s name was Art Song. As a singer with some serious training, I have several basic books whose covers read “Arias and Art Songs.” Over many years in choruses, I’ve known many, many aspiring musicians who have had to give up their career dreams. Those streams of consciousness had a way of segueing one into the other.

You’ve used couplets of tetrameter to good effect in “Mean” as well as other poems, such as this one from Umbrella. The closeness—maybe I mean tightness, along with the really nice rhyme, make these poems the kind I want to pick up and hold, to see on a broadside (or a billboard, for that matter). Do you remember how you began writing with this sort of structure? What are its attractions for you?

Meter is fundamental for me; I have a hard time not writing in meter. I began by writing blank verse almost exclusively. Over the past several years my use of meter has grown tighter and I’ve used more tetrameter and more rhyme. This structure links in my mind with charms and spells. When I write a rhymed tet poem I feel as though I’m withdrawing to a private place and doing magic. Think of Macbeth’s witches. Or Dylan Thomas’s “In My Craft or Sullen Art,” which is actually in syllabics, but which I spent years hearing as a kind of tetrameter.

How did you find the process of making “Wall Work”—a frustration, a delight, or some of each? Do you have a secret strategy for dealing with the little piles of articles that (at least in my experience with the paradelle) tend to accumulate at the ends of the stanzas?

This is the first paradelle I’ve actually completed, and I’ll confess that they’re crazy-making, which is probably why the sensation of madness took over in this one. It’s amazing to me that they can be made to work as well as they manifestly do in collections like The Paradelle, from Red Hen Press. And my terrible confession is this: my secret strategy is to play fast and loose with the rules of the form. I don’t insist that every article appear the same number of times that it appears in the source lines, just that all the different words are represented. I think Billy Collins would approve of my approach. Maybe I should come up with an obscure manuscript in Old Occitan containing examples of this variant of the form.

Yes, please send us a copy of that manuscript when you find it. . . . As a poet who does your work outside of academia, what’s your relationship to the academic poetry world?

I’m grateful not to be under pressure to find work teaching poetry writing, because I’m really much better equipped to teach legal writing, or the history of English, or Beowulf. I’m interested in all the work other poets are producing, whether they’re working in creative writing programs or teaching ESL or writing briefs or seeing patients or selling insurance.

What helps you make time for writing?

I give it my weekday evenings, something I can do much more easily now that my children are adults, and now that my mother is in assisted living, than I could in the past.

Your collection Breath Control is forthcoming from David Robert Books. Tell us about the book.

The book’s main subject is how we adjust to wrenching changes: children’s departure; changes in love relationships; changed views of literature we once loved; parents’ aging and death; the way war distorts even those who aren’t fighting; and struggles with faith. Nearly all the poems are metered, though only half are rhymed; blank verse, sapphics, alliterative verse and other unrhymed forms make up the rest. It should be out by March.