What Sparks Poetry is a serialized feature in which we invite poets to explore experiences and ideas that spark new poems. In our new series, Drafts, we invite poets to explore the writing and rewriting of poems, and their many lives before (and even after) publication. Each Monday's delivery brings you a poem and an excerpt from the essay.
Octavio Quintanilla
Tonight, I expect the only star in the sky to be
so bright I’ll forget all I know about sorrow,
how it feels like sandpaper against skin, 
how it looks like the old woman my mother has become.
I was still a boy when I watched my father plant a fig tree
in the back yard, me not knowing much about the fruit it promised,
but enough knowing about the river running through 
my father’s quiet as he dug a hole to make his offering.
Ever since, I’ve been running in the opposite direction
of hope, trying to logic my way out of God’s existence.
It gets tiring tunneling through time till I get close 
enough to see an exit and then time begins again, but this time
without the people I have loved. A day will come
when my body will no longer open like a suitcase
to take myself on a journey where I’ll dream
of never being found, where I’ll dream of never finding
what I’ve lost. I no longer have a need for it, no more fig tree,
no more father, the backyard sold long ago to strangers.
from the book THE BOOK OF WOUNDED SPARROWS / Texas Review Press
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Color cover image of Octavio Quintanilla's collection, The Book of Wounded Sparrows
What Sparks Poetry:
Octavio Quintanilla on Drafts

"I write and rewrite the poem over and over because small but significant changes happen in the process, especially in terms of the poem earning my trust and having me believe in what it says. To get there, I rewrite the poem till every word is embodied with breath or heartbeat....As I rewrite, I teach myself my own poem. Internalize it."
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Color headshot of a dynamic Jan Beatty at a microphone
"Jan Beatty—Poet. Madwoman. Ally."

"Write the poem you’re afraid to write. That’s the mantra-like advice Jan Beatty has been prescribing to budding poets of all stripes for over three decades, as the now-retired professor has seemingly had a guiding hand in the education of every writer in Pittsburgh. With her latest collection, Dragstripping (University of Pittsburgh Press, $18), it’s clear that Beatty has been heeding her own instruction."

viaBELT MAGAZINE
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