How does one start writing a long "epic" poem? In 1997 I'd already written 2 or 3 not-quite-successful ones. After 15 years of off-&-on writing, I'd noticed that "going back to Mandelstam" often had a renewing or reviving effect on me.

Stubborn Grew began as an act of desperation. For a long time I'd been making notes & more notes toward a long poem. The beginning of Stubborn was finally a kind of "decomposition" : I let myself go. I started imitating the slangy, informal quality of some of Mandelstam's late poems from Voronezh. & I centered myself imaginatively in that same "black earth". Stubborn was a lucky conjunction of a style (Mandelstamish quatrains) & a plot - Orpheus-Bluejay-Henry returning to the earth to "bring back the dead". I had no idea how far those quatrains & that plot would take me.

from the 1st chapter of Stubborn:

11

 
It begins with the headache of a rational animal.
Sepulchred, perhaps, in a whitened rhyme
or bibliophile's musty drawers - reflective rim
or echo chamber, some titanic scuttled shell.

 
And you lose the thread, and this is the thread.
Purpled, from the mordant notebook,
from the charitable extinct awk's
last corkscrew into a cup of molten mead,

 
like lead.  The chorus and audience withdraw.
You are alone with the sound of an evening of a swing.
Here's the church, here's the steeple... here's the door.