Paul Moorehead is an emerging poet and physician. He lives in St. John’s with his partner and their two daughters. His poetry has appeared previously in Pinhole Poetry and in Turnstyle: the SABR Journal of Baseball Arts. His debut chapbook, Acorn Becoming Oak, will be published with Pinhole Poetry this summer.
You can read Dads and Giants: An Apologia in the April 2024 issue.
Would you like to tell us a little bit more about your poem? For instance, how or why you wrote it, or perhaps provide some extra context?
I’d been trying to write about boulders and glaciers and giants for a long time. I drive by the bog described in the poem quite often, and I always wanted to write about it. (I still want to write about it, even thought I’ve already written this poem.) The piece I had in mind was an extended discussion of how the natural explanations for phenomena always turn out to be more awe-inspiring than any supernatural explanation might have been. (This theme does appear briefly in what I eventually ended up writing.) But the poem wasn’t working at all. Then my daughter made a mess with her breakfast, and while this is an entirely commonplace event, on the day of the peanut butter toast it just struck me differently, and I saw a juxtaposition that I could put to work in this poem.
Why was the poetic form the best fit for this particular piece of work?
Poetry is a great medium for talking about questions that don’t have ready answers. I’ve had so many experiences as a father where I don’t understand my actions or my responses. Why get angry over something that is as trivial as toast? This would be hard to talk about sensibly in conversation, even if honest and thoughtful conversations about fathering were common. (They are not.) But this kind of “I don’t know what this means but I have thoughts about it and I have a need to speak” thing is something that poetry is best at.
Do you have a collection of poetry or even a single poem that acts as a touchstone?
Sue Goyette’s Ocean is a wonderful book that opened my imagination up to how poetry can engage with the natural world in ways that go beyond what’s usually seen.
How do you revise your work?
I actually really like revision, sometimes more than I like starting a new piece. (Although there is very little that’s better than those rare moments when the first draft of a new poem just comes flying out of your brain via your pencil.) I write early drafts on paper, so I’ll go over the last draft and scratch things out and leave comments and rewrite. Each pass I might concentrate on some different aspect of the poem: the sound of the piece, word choices, etc. Eventually I might get to a version of the poem that seems to work. It’s invaluable to have others read my work and then take their thoughts seriously. Not every comment needs to result in a change to a poem. Even the ones that don’t can reveal something about how a reader responded to a poem.
What are you working on now?
I’ve finished a full poetry manuscript, and I’m trying to find a publishing home for that. And I’m starting to think about my next project, which might be a poetic biography of the mathematician Évariste Galois, woven with my own experience of mathematics. I’d like it to be a book that will leave the reader with an appreciation of Galois and his work, and of the beauty that is possible to find in mathematics, and of the reflection of that beauty in the world we live in. It hurts my heart whenever I hear someone talk about mathematics in a way that tells me that they’ve never seen beauty in it.
How or where or with what does a poem begin?
Usually with a thought — an image, a story, a moment, whatever — that I can’t get out of my head. I’ve usually been thinking about a poem for a time, sometimes short and sometimes long, before I start engaging with it on paper.
Are there other art forms that inspire or inform your poetry?
Science and math, if I’m allowed to call those art forms. Popular culture: my poems are populated by folks like the Incredible Hulk and Bruce Lee. I can’t be bothered with writing about Greek and Roman mythology, but that’s okay because we have modern gods of our own. That said, I cannot, for whatever reason, get away from pharaohs and mummies.
In terms of poetic style or craft, is there a big question you are trying to find an answer for?
The possibilities for poetry are so endless: you can write about the small and the large, the very concrete or the very abstract, the intensely personal and the universal. So I’m finding that as I get further into it, my ambition for my poetry gets larger. Put as a questions about craft: Whatever happened to epic poetry? How can I dig some of that up in my own head? And scratch it onto paper with a pencil?