MARK JARMAN: Well, as the poem I read suggests, I get a lot of ideas from the Bible. I am a minister's son. I grew up in a strongly religious household in which this was the principal text, although there were other things to read, too. And I find that I can go back to scenes in the life of Christ or I can go back to the letters of Paul or I can go back to the first five books of the Bible and always find something-- usually in a way of using language, not necessarily the episodes. That's one place.
Otherwise, I'd say it's memory. The older I get, the more access I have to the life I have lived. And I let things, as I said, in my writing process just sort of swim up, and I kind of catch a hold of them if they're-- if they have anything like the body of language, I can catch something and put it down.
When I wrote the poems like "If I Were Paul," which is in a book called Epistles, I began because a friend of mine had lost one of her children to suicide. And I had no way to respond-- no way to respond. And I had to come up with the way Paul writes to the Corinthians. That's what I did it. It became a completely objectified sense. So it's always different things-- events in your life; memory, which grows and grows; and a particular text, in my case.