Tony Barnstone: “‘Why I’m Not a Carpenter’ was a poem I wrote inspired by a dinner I had with Yusef Komunyakaa, who is editing an anthology of carpenter poems. At that dinner, I promised Yusef a poem, and so wrote this one to order. My brother Rob is a former carpenter who is now an architect and professor, and I spent many of the summers of my youth working with Rob renovating houses in Greece and Boston, in Vermont and Indiana. In our unusual crew, the working class grunt sinking post holes or wiping his sawdust-covered brow was most likely a Harvard architecture student, a brilliant painter, or, in my case, a graduate student at Berkeley writing his dissertation on William Carlos Williams, and I strongly felt the way these different kinds of craft still carried gender biases and constructions of masculinity and femininity. I decided to reference my insufficient skills as a carpenter and as a poet in part by alluding to the title of Frank O’Hara’s wonderful poem ‘Why I’m Not a Painter,’ in which he shows the parallel and yet divergent skill sets and mind sets that go into painting versus poetry. Another element in the poem, the story about Achilles killing the Amazon queen, comes not from The Iliad, but from the 4th century epic poem by Quintus of Smyma that I happened to be reading. Quintus’s epic, titled Posthomerica, is a Trojan War poem that creates some new Homeric stories and puts a new spin on the familiar ones. The final element that I blended in was a failed draft of a poem that I had tried to write while working on a crew in Boston in 1988 or so. I am particularly happy that that failed draft, one that I worked on for years without success, has finally been crafted into the poem that I like. Thank you, Yusef!” (web)
