M. Bartley Seigel’s debut collection of poetry, This Is What They Say, just out through Typecast Publishing, is dedicated “to the people and places of Montcalm County, Michigan.” Seigel speaks of his hometown in an intensely personal way, revealing little snippets of time from his youth and surroundings. In prose poems to tell stories and recall memories, Seigel shows a unique place in time, leaving us recalling these moments as if they were our own. I spoke with the poet via e-mail about his teenage hangout spots, what there is to do in Michigan, what trinkets he collects, and what gets him inspired.

JESSICA FURIANI: I wanted to ask you a few questions about your childhood and where you grew up if that’s okay, because some of the things you said hit close to home and since then this stuff has been floating around my head!

Your collection This Is What They Say is dedicated to the people and places of Montcalm County, Michigan. Your collection shows a different side to what is referred to in your Typecast Publishing interview as a “first world wasteland.” You said you hated it as a kid and I relate to that. When you’re a kid, you feel trapped in the town you live in. When you get older, you learn to appreciate it. I went to visit my parents the other night and was sitting in my dad’s car waiting for him to pump gas at the gas station my friends and I always met up at. I was so bored then. Did you and your friends have a hangout like that?

M. BARTLEY SEIGEL: There was a place in the town I grew up in called The Snack Shack. It was a little fast food place. It’s gone now, and there’s a McDonald’s. But at the time that was one of the places to gather. Then there was the cemetery where a lot of smoking, drinking, and hanging out was accomplished. And there was a place called the Peach Orchard out in the woods where bonfires and associated activities were held.

FURIANI: You say it took you a while to “put the angst to bed” before writing poems about where you grew up. What about Montcalm County made you feel angst when you were living there?

SEIGEL: Mostly, it’s just about being a teenager, I think. It’s about hormones and needing to get out from under your parents’ shadows and away from all of the people you’re forced into proximity with by virtue of being born in a place. I’m not entirely sure small-town kids have the market on teen angst locked up. Friends who grew up in both suburban and urban settings report similar experiences. But small towns have their own unique take on the theme. Everybody quite literally knows everybody else. While it may be easier to disappear into the landscape, there’s nowhere else to hide.

FURIANI: What, if anything, made growing up in Montcalm County different from growing up somewhere else in the United States?

SEIGEL: There are a lot of Montcalm counties all over the world. It’s a confluence of factors. Homogeneity. Industrialization. Poor education. Certain kinds of poverty. The list goes on. It’s just about the particulars and how they combine. What kind of poverty combined with what kind of industry? What kind of homogeneity combined with what kind of poor education? Montcalm County is unique in the way it puts those pieces of the puzzle together, but not particularly unique in that it either has pieces or that life is a puzzle.

FURIANI: What was your high school experience like? What would a teenager in Montcalm County, Michigan find themselves doing for fun on a Saturday night?

SEIGEL: In the late 80’s, early 90’s? Part Fast Times at Ridgemont High. Part Winter’s Bone. We drank a lot. We sat around a lot of bonfires. There were fights and girls and looking for anything that resembled a novelty or a thrill. Some friends and I used to steal a lawn chair off someone’s lawn, find a particularly desolate stretch of back road, set the chair in the middle of the road with a piece of fishing line tied to it, then we’d hide in the bushes or in the corn. Someone would come along, get out of their car to either move the chair or take it, and we’d pull the string, making the chair and the victim jump high into the air. A guy pulled a knife one time, cussing and stamping, cut the line, and took the chair while my friends and I ran into the woods screaming.

FURIANI: Your high school years sound a lot like mine! You’ve gotta find something to distract yourself in a small town. You’re definitely right about the hormones. We’re all itching like mad to get our lives going. It’s torture to just watch the clock so slowly. I definitely did my fair share of drinking and smoking around bonfires. When in doubt, go into the woods, right? I always loved to write ever since I was a kid. As a kid, did you feel you could express yourself better on paper? Did you feel a sense of power in the way you were able to express yourself through words?

SEIGEL: Language is power. If you control words, control the story, you control situation and the people in it. Language won’t get you out of every scrap, but it will get you out of many. Look at the current election cycle and the money spent on ads. That’s about language and control if nothing else is. Think of the money that goes into that!

FURIANI: This Is What They Say was published by Typecast Publishing, based in Louisville, Kentucky. How did you get involved with them?
 
SEIGEL: I had published some poems in Lumberyard Magazine. I loved their aesthetic. Jen Woods, the editor of Typecast, also edits Lumberyard. The relationship grew from there.

FURIANI: Typecast’s website says that your book is “entirely made by human hands, letter pressed and designed by The Firecracker Press,” and they are based in St. Louis, Missouri. How did you get linked up with Firecracker Press? Did Typecast refer you to them?

SEIGEL: Firecracker is run by Eric Woods, Jen Woods’ brother, so that collaboration was there from the beginning. Firecracker does all of Typecast’s books, or has thus far. But it was one of the reasons I was interested in Typecast to begin with. That artisanal thing they do with books is really important to me. Books are sacred objects, not industrial commodities.

FURIANI: I agree with you. In another one of my classes, we just talked about the disappearance of books and it made me sad. I don’t think it will ever happen, though. There’s something about a nice, worn book that a Kindle can’t give you. Was it a conscious choice to have your book be handmade? Do you have an interest in sustainability?

SEIGEL: It was. I write about people whose hands are dirty. I wanted my book object to reflect that. And yes, I am interested in sustainability, especially local economies and skilled trades.

FURIANI: Who do you find your audience is? Younger folks? Older folks? A mixture?

SEIGEL: I’m an odd mix. PANK skews my audience younger than I think I merit and I get lumped in with a kind of alt-lit cadre that I’m not entirely sure I fit neatly into. I’m almost 40. Likewise, at the older, more pedigreed end of the spectrum, where I’m being read at all, I get the feeling I’m not being entirely trusted (maybe just paranoia on my part), like I’m an odd interloper of some kind.
But who knows, really? When I did my little Midwest tour last month, I read to all kinds of crowds and I never knew who would be the person coming up afterward to talk about the book. It takes all kinds, I guess.

FURIANI: You moved to Houghton, Michigan, which I just found out was rated one of the 100 Best Small Towns in America.

SEIGEL: Houghton is an end-of-the-road kind of place. There’s no real way to pass through here. Let’s call it quirky. Gorgeous country, woods, Lake Superior, 19th century sandstone architecture, lots of mining ruins. It’s very ghostly in some ways. I live in East Houghton, in a house with a yard, between the old downtown and Michigan Technological University’s campus. I like to mountain bike (we have some of the best in the world, believe it or not), swim, camp.

We just had a little film festival where my favorite offering was Beasts of the Southern Wild. There’s good skiing in the winter. Food isn’t particularly fantastic up here. There’s good pizza, meat-and-potatoes kinds of places, some mediocre Chinese that gets better if you can get them to let you order off the part of the menu they only write in Chinese, and a nice little microbrewery/tap house. We’ve got a pretty kick-ass co-op, too. If you want to drink, Houghton will provide. It’s something of an Olympic-class sport here. We’re very proud drinkers.

FURIANI: You live with your wife Marika and kids Annika and Indrek. I was wondering if you could tell me about the origin of their names because they are very beautiful and interesting.

SEIGEL: My wife’s family is Estonian on her mother’s side. Annika is a popular Scandanavian name. Indrek (Ints for short) is a very common Estonian name. We travel to Estonia quite a bit. There’s still a lot of family there. Both kids have dual citizenship.

FURIANI: You are the founding editor of literary magazine PANK along with Roxane Gay. How did you meet her? How has PANK changed since its birth in 2006?

SEIGEL: I started the magazine in 2006 when I first got a job at Michigan Tech. Roxane was a graduate student there at the time, studying for a PhD in rhetoric. We met, both had an interest in the magazine, and the rest is the rest. Stars aligning, really. We’re an odd couple in many, many ways, but whatever it is that we both bring to the project (besides ridiculous amounts of work) has been magic.
 
FURIANI: What is your writing process? Do you doodle? Journal? Does it ever just come to you?

SEIGEL: I’m writing about 90% of my workday. I’m writing now. I’m writing emails, texts, I journal and jot, doodle, and scribble. I make a lot of lists. And I read, constantly, voraciously, obsessively. I write “seriously” in intense bouts, a day here, a day there, until production adds up to something I can develop and revise. But I tend to think of process radically, that my entire life is part of my artistic process. Food is art. Parenting is art. Sex and travel and doing the dishes and walking the dog, all art. It all feeds in. Presence and mindfulness are important concepts for me. No matter where I go, there I am, no less so as a writer than as anything else.

FURIANI: I have all kinds of rocks and dead flowers and butterfly wings and things from my past that I like to put on my dresser where I can see them. I like to be surrounded by it. Do you collect any little trinkets for inspiration?

SEIGEL: “Cabinets of curiosity,” the Victorians called them. Yes, I have different kinds of totems. Natural things. Sticks. Stones. Feathers. Artifacts. I like face jugs. Old glass bottles. Matryoshka dolls. Little Buddha figures.

FURIANI: Who are some of your favorite poets of all time?

SEIGEL: Walt Whitman, Gertrude Stein, Alan Ginsberg, Charles Bukowski, Anis Mojgani, just to name a few through time.

Author, poet, musician, artist, triathlete, and all-around talent Todd Colby is the author of poetry books Riot in the Charm Factory, Cush, Ripsnort, and Tremble and Shine. Colby took some time out of his busy schedule to exchange emails about his new collection of poems, Flushing Meadows, as well as where he gets his information from, what it means to be a poet, and other fantastical subjects.

ZWACK: Your latest work, Flushing Meadows, is a collection of poems. How did this book come to be and is there any one poem that sticks out as a favorite?

COLBY: I’ve been working on a collection of poems for a couple of years now and then Scary Topiary Press contacted me, asking if I had a manuscript of poems they could publish in a chapbook. I did have a bunch of poems, so I selected some of my newest work that held together as a volume of poems that resonated with each other and served the goal of having a unified book of poems.

I don’t really have a favorite because that would mean I’d also have a least favorite and I like all of them on an equal level. They’re like children. How do I pick a favorite? Is that at cop-out?

ZWACK: I wouldn’t say it’s a cop-out exactly. Where did the name for the title and title poem come from? What was the inspiration?

COLBY: I’ve always thought the place Flushing Meadows in Queens here in NYC is such a compelling place name. The two words, while incongruous, have a certain absurd ring to them: Flushing Meadows, like a toilet flushes, yet something is very pastoral about the word Meadows. Basically, it makes me smile when I see the title, so I used it.

ZWACK: Toilet flushes and meadows, a very interesting combination! Now, there’s a lot of talk in your book about cities, mainly New York and London. In the poem “United Kingdom” you write: “I am so used to leaning in front of someone and muttering you suffer from pronation, that even in the Tube I think: wrong shoes. This city is by my side.” What is it about these places that pull you in?

COLBY: I love the energy and the intense juxtaposition of events that make both London and New York City cities of ellipses. Everything crashes into something else like a living collage that makes my mind go into overdrive. It gets unbearable sometimes but mostly I feed on it and let it enter into my own writing. One of my favorite things to do in any city is to simply walk around aimlessly letting impulse and intuition guide me.

ZWACK: I think “United Kingdom” is my favorite poem. In a handful of lines you’re able to capture such a genuine representation of being an American in London. Can you talk more about the poem?

COLBY: “United Kingdom” came out of that elated, dislocated feeling that being in a foreign city provides. I was also being put up in a fancy hotel (The Shoreditch House), so I felt this odd feeling of having the third eye on me at all times, literally like I was in a movie. It was not at all like the life I live in NYC.
I was wandering around all day, observing people doing things, taking photos of graffiti, and basically just being an artist with nothing to worry about. Yet still, I kept having thoughts of my life back home come intruding into my pleasant London mindset. I tried to capture that split, or duality and I think it worked for the most part. 

ZWACK: Now, being someone of the MTV generation, I was really excited to see clips of your spoken-word poetry, “Bad,” that appeared on TV in 1993. How was that experience? It’s almost weird to think that MTV used to play music videos and have such talented people like you on.

COLBY: It was a crazy time in the NYC poetry world. I was also in a band then so it was a pretty heady time filled with all sorts of attention from the mass media controlling culture.

I also realized that the gaze or attention of that sort of media is fleeting and wouldn’t last, and it didn’t, but I was happy to use it to my advantage while it lasted and was able to parlay the attention into some other ventures that were quite fun and unexpected.

ZWACK: I went and researched the MTV appearance and was taken aback by how cool it was and how annoyed that I was about seven years too young to have seen it in real time. Speaking of media, you’re very involved in online media, with your own website and Twitter. Do you find this is the best way to get your work/ideas/thoughts out to the world?

COLBY: I like to have as many options as possible for the play of my ideas and thoughts. I mean, if all of these mediums are available to us as writers, why not take advantage of them and manipulate them in such a way that the mediums actually complement the writing and even help change it in ways that would not have happened outside of that format or medium?

ZWACK: One of your more recent tweets struck me as interesting: “Fact: Being a poet in the USA is a really odd thing to do in 2012. Fuck shit up.”’ This is a common saying among college kids, but as far as I know, not poets. Can you expand on what you mean by fucking shit up as a poet?

COLBY: Fuck Shit Up: I just think in 2012 it is a really wacky time to participate in poetry. A great time mind you, but also a wacky time during this height of consumerism and art as capital and the value of works of art in both the art world and the film world and how marginalized poetry really is in that context.

I mean, there is no inherent monetary value to poetry. But what this situation does is free us all, as poets, from that market-driven world and allows us to fuck shit up because we really have no one to answer to but ourselves and our peers as poets. We’ll never get in that game, nor do any of us want to get involved in that game. So, yes, Fuck Shit Up every day. 

ZWACK: Good advice with a far better rationale. I came across a piece of your word art that said: “What I need to do is lighten the fuck up about a lot of shit.” Do you ever feel too critical of yourself or your work? 

COLBY: I wrote: “What I need to do is lighten the fuck up about a lot of shit” on a little yellow post-it while going through a tough and particularly sad breakup. I heard this voice say the line and thought, “yes!” that is exactly what I need to do! So I hung it on my wall, that little yellow post-it, and kept it there until one day I finally framed it and made it officially “art” using these large vinyl stick-on letters I get at Staples.

Marianne Vitale, a dear friend of mine and a super wonderful artist, purchased the piece from me. About a year later she contacted me and said she needed a name for her art show and asked for permission to use the title, “What I need to do is lighten the fuck up about a lot of shit,” for her show. I was thrilled she found it compelling enough to use as the title. I can sometimes be hard on myself.

ZWACK: It’s all part of the process, right? It means you care. I discovered an audio clip of your reading of the poem, “Cake,” and it was really out there, but in the best way. How do you speak so well when reading poetry?

Poet-drummer Jared Harel and his wife Yael welcomed a baby girl into their lives on November 16, 2012. The happy couple had decided to name her Neta: Hebrew for both “a seedling” and “to plant.” Besides being a first-time dad, Harel is a drummer in the New York City band, The Dust Engineers. He’s also a passionate lover of Bob Dylan music for the same reason some dislike the singer: Dylan’s voice is imperfect. “I often feel that when a voice is imperfect, it makes the lyrics feel more earnest and believable,” he says. Jared’s view of Dylan’s voice relates to my view of reality: if something is imperfect, it is in fact more “earnest and believable.” After all, there is no such thing as perfect.

Jared is a longtime, hardworking poet. As he put it: “One should expect writing to be difficult. If we writers only wrote when we were properly inspired, we’d only write a handful of times per year.” From his home in Queens, NY, Jared discussed, over email, his writing career, music, and more specifically, his recently published chapbook, The Body Double. This is a complex series of poems combining point of view, irony, and play with words.

BURCH: Is The Body Double an autobiographical poem?

HAREL:Is the poem based on my life? Yes. Is it an autobiographical poem? Absolutely not. More specifically, the poem investigates issues of identity and autobiography, as well as Rimbaud’s famous dictum that “I is another”: we are always, somehow, at a distance from ourselves. Though certain sections have autobiographical elements, the poem as a whole veers off, exaggerates, and splits off from the truth, etc. This is where the notion of the body double comes in.

BURCH: While reading The Body Double, the line, “I showed you my penis. I pointed out trees,” made me think of Freud, because his psychoanalytic theory placed a great deal of emphasis on sexual impulses, and because his therapy technique of dream analysis tendedto interpret objects such as trees as having sexual implications.

HAREL: Interesting read. I was considering the obvious connections between “tree” and “penis,” but also their differences. I liked the juxtaposition of the speaker showing something so personal, then suddenly pointing off towards something vague in the distance. To me, that seemed like a nice metaphor for this project.

BURCH: I tried to do a research paper last semester on the play Waiting for Godot and existentialism, but all the scholarly journals I could find about existentialism went way over my head.

HAREL: An existential crisis is when someone goes into a panic, questioning the very foundation of his or her life. In this moment of exasperation for the speaker, with his double in bed beside him, an existential crisis would be welcoming by comparison.

BURCH: What happens to the father in the poem? In the first stanza, it sounds like he is alive, but missing in action. In the second it sounds like he died: “swallowed by the hood of a Buick.” Or might I be misinterpreting things? I admit I’m not very analytical.

HAREL: The father character is not dead in this poem, though he is “absent.” The father character is a mechanic by trade, and so being “swallowed by the hood of a Buick” is one way of saying that the father is consumed by his work to the point of invisibility. It’s as though he’s been swallowed by the car itself. At least that’s my read on it.

BURCH: Why the line: “I’ll keep them out of this. Consider it a kindness”? Does it refer to the parents? After all, they had already been mentioned in the first stanza, so this line is a contradiction.

HAREL: Exactly right. The speaker, you’ll notice, constantly contradicts himself. He is an unreliable narrator. Furthermore, I view this first section you’re referring to as the initial split between the speaker and his double. “I’ll keep them out of this” is made untrue by the very presence of that line, and many others.

BURCH: Who is your favorite poet?

HAREL: I have many favorites: Elizabeth Bishop, C.K. Williams, Wallace Stevens, Thomas Lux, Terrance Hayes, Mark Doty, and Alice Fulton. Lately, I’ve been very taken by the poetry of Robert Lowell. One of the first poets to truly capture my interest and imagination was Stephen Dunn. In writing The Body Double, I was strongly influenced by Zbigniew Herbert’s poetry collection, Mr. Cogito.

BURCH: When did you first start writing?

HAREL: I began writing poems seriously my senior year of high school. My English teacher at the time, Mrs. Schmidt, asked us to write five poems for our poetry section. I think I wrote twenty, and kept on going. I had very little quality control back then. I think what first drew me to poetry was its ability to track time—to record and document the world around me. These days, I demand far more of the poems I write, yet I’m grateful I wasn’t so hard on myself back then. Poetry came naturally to me. I write short stories as well, but I hardly ever have enough to say to constitute as a full story. For a while in college, my poems read like really, really short stories.

BURCH: You write, at some point: “There is no room for surrealism.” Wouldn’t you think this line is ironic, seeing as the whole idea of the poem is, in fact, pretty surreal?

HAREL: Yes, it is ironic. It’s worth noting that while many of the themes in this book (loss, death, and identity) are serious ones, at least to me, one of the overarching themes of the book is “play.” I had a lot of fun writing this. I have long found the concept of doubling fascinating, and I enjoyed watching the two of them interact and get on one another’s nerves over the course of the narrative.

BURCH: Where did you get the inspiration for The Body Double?

HAREL: I began writing this series as a reaction to all the “autobiographical poems” I was writing. I was shocked to find that even in such deeply personal works, I was a very unreliable narrator, if not an outright liar. I found myself struggling with the notion of what is true in my poems. What obligations I had to actual fact. This got me thinking, and so I decided to create an exact replica of myself, a body double. I have long found the concept of doubling fascinating, and both intellectually and psychologically, it has been a great deal of fun watching the two of us interact.

BURCH: You play drums for The Dust Engineers, a rock band in NYC. Is rock your favorite kind of music?

HAREL: I certainly love rock music, but not strictly. Even my band The Dust Engineers pulls from various influences such as country, blues, folk, and twang. I should mention that I’m a huge Bob Dylan fan, a preference that factors specifically into one of the body double sections.

BURCH: How long have you been teaching at Centenary College?Do you enjoy teaching writing?

HAREL: This is currently my fourth year teaching Creative Writing at Centenary College. I love working with students and talking poetry. My favorite part of teaching is getting a student of mine to fall in love with the written word, helping them develop into strong, daring writers, and helping them to understand that poems aren’t simply the cryptic puzzles they labored over in high school, but a way to reinvigorate language.
The poet Charles Simic once wrote that: “I’d like to show readers that the most familiar things around them are unintelligible.” I try to teach my students that language is alive and ever changing. To be a writer is to make the world anew.

—-

Excerpt from The Body Double

I forgot who
you were, your name
and face,

your place
in my mind
was suddenly

amiss. Forgive me,
I whispered.
This is my pad.

You must be
my sibling. Here
is a mango.

I reached for you
and felt
only wind.

The sky, I uttered,
is terribly blue.
That poodle

you are petting
was implausibly
born.
You said
nothing. The narrative
forbid it.

I showed you
my penis. I pointed
out trees.

§

Since true emotions are inarticulate
and a tear is sincere only
by definition, I shut down
to find out the story, get the facts

by factoring out. My girlfriend
hates this: one-word answers,
the incessant silence, my double
all snowy like a broken TV.

She wonders what he’s thinking,
what I think of her outfit.
She turns to the mirror when he fails
to respond. Then one night

after screwing, she screams
I’m leaving! and straightens herself,
searching for her bra. By the time
she’s down the block, I see

she means it. He sees she means it
but can’t see what she means.

§

My body double tells me
I’m away on business
and won’t be back
for quite some time.

Meanwhile, he’s agreed
to read my mail,
pick up the newspaper,
just to be safe.

He insists it’s no trouble
walking my dog,
dating my girlfriend,
raking the leaves

around my refinished deck.
If I need to call,
I should try
my own number,

unless it is Sunday,
in which case,

Leslie Adrienne Miller is an award-winning poet, mother, world traveler, and professor of English at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. She has been writing since the age of 11 and discovered contemporary poetry in college. Leslie has published six collections of poetry: Staying Up for Love, Yesterday Had A Man In It, Eat Quite Everything You See, Ungodliness, The Resurrection Trade, and her most recent collection entitled Y. One reviewer calls the book as “full of hints and clues, ever pressing us toward an illuminating insight that will, quick as lightning, return us to our darkness.” Leslie took time out of her busy teaching schedule to join me via email to discuss Y.

DANIELLE DEMICHELE: The poems in Y discuss the child who is enigmatic and not necessarily understood. You did a great deal of research in child psychology and child development when you were preparing to write this book. I am majoring in Special Education so I work with these types of children often. Were you ever interested in these areas before writing this book?

LESLIE ADRIENNE MILLER: I think probably all children are “enigmatic and not necessarily understood” when it comes to the adults in their lives. Of course, we have all been children, but so much of our physical memory of being children disappears as we age, and more importantly, the context has changed: the world we were children in disappeared with our childhood.
That said, I have to say that my interest in children and child development was rooted in my role as a parent of a boy. I read mainly to try to understand what I might be witnessing as I watched him develop and not necessarily for information. As a poet, I’ve probably never read anything purely for informational purposes, so I read material from the sciences, I’m sure, in ways that are pretty antithetical to the way the writers intend that material. I pay attention to the language, the nuances, and the absurdities, and I hope I often find poetry where none was intended.

DEMICHELE: Have you always been interested in writing poetry? How did you first realize you liked it?

MILLER: I started writing when I was about 11, but I am not sure I knew what I was doing or that I had a name for it at first. I did have encouraging teachers in middle school and high school who recognized my affinity and gave it the name of poetry, but even then I had no idea living people did it or were able to make of it a vocation. College changed that radically as I encountered living poets and found my way to the magical books of contemporary poetry that lit my way forward.

DEMICHELE: What inspired you to write Y?

MILLER: Y is a natural outgrowth of my last collection of poems, The Resurrection Trade, which offered an extended meditation on the relationship between science and art focused very specifically through a series of medical images of pregnant women. Y focuses on the child. Y extends the meditation on (or mediation of) science and art, but in this collection, the subject matter and research materials include a more eclectic mixture of sources from the sciences (biological and social) on the Y chromosome; the social and cognitive development of children’s language acquisition; the fabled “wild children” of Germany and France; the rift between theology and science (belief and “fact”) that Darwin’s theories introduce into Western thought (and subsequent disciplinary divisions); some materials on the history and training of boy sopranos (a science of its own that links male physical and spiritual development); as well as historical and contemporary materials on the “reading” of the human face.

Uniting these interdisciplinary forays are more traditional poems addressing the moral and linguistic development of male children, the philosophical conflicts inherent in this task for the adults who must manage this development, and the parallel dilemma of the contemporary poet for whom traditional poetic strategies like narrative and extreme subjectivity are increasingly inadequate and/or in need of renovation. Taken altogether, the poems and the “adversaria” in Y attempt to find connections between and among these areas of study as they probe the elusive mind/body, nurture/nature dichotomies in human male development—which cannot, of course, be seen or understood because they are dynamic, unstable, but they can, through metaphor’s momentary magic, be glimpsed, the only satisfaction we humans are likely to get in contemplating this complex of ideas.

DEMICHELE: One of the lines that really stood out to me in Y was, “…raising the tent of bones in which he will harbor all the starry anomalies that a knowledge of God cannot undo.” It puts into words what children with autism are like. What were you thinking of when you were writing this part?

MILLER: The idea of a child’s bones being like tent poles that slowly raise a body, an interior space that is both physical and psychological has often occurred to me in watching my own child grow. When they’re babies, so recently part of their mothers, we tend to think of them with more sense of ownership. We grew them inside ourselves, fed them from our bodies—but after that, motherhood is a long period of letting go, watching the body to which you gave life become more and more separate, a place where things will be hidden from the mother, a fascinating place certainly, a whole galaxy of its own, much of which you will never know.

Of course, one of the biggest parts of the parent’s job then is to give the child a sense of right and wrong, life and death, danger and safety, all those abstract notions that the child encounters incrementally. “God” is perhaps a way of packaging all that learning about human limits. You know you have to teach the child these things even though you also know that the feral parts of him may win out. We can teach our kids about decency, kindness, and love, but knowing these things doesn’t change the fact that darker forces are still alive in him.

DEMICHELE: Do you ever have difficulties writing or coming up with new ideas? I know when I write papers for class it can be challenging at times to get my words and thoughts together.

MILLER: Writing for me is always torture. There is pleasure and satisfaction, but those are the results of having written something that pleases me, and I don’t get that pleasure and satisfaction every time I write. Sometimes I can squander days chasing an idea only to have it seem, finally, silly or dull. Sometimes I even envy people with jobs that stay at the workplace! Mine comes with me everywhere, even to sleep, and though writing is torture, not writing is worse torture!

DEMICHELE: What do you do to feel ready to write?

MILLER: I am a morning writer, always have been. I don’t think I’ve ever written a line worth saving after three in the afternoon. I also, much to the chagrin of those who have tried to live with me, do not like to see or talk to anyone in the morning before I write. I need strong coffee, but I don’t like to risk human interaction to get it, so I try to sneak out of bed and go to the desk just before dawn. It doesn’t always work, but there is definitely something about that state, not asleep but not quite awake, not yet engaged with others or the business of the day—that feeds poetry. If people try to talk to me in the morning, though, it’s gone, and I generally can’t get it back.

DEMICHELE: Do you have any methods to prevent writer’s block?

MILLER: Reading, reading, and more reading.

DEMICHELE: If you could have any other profession besides a writer and a professor what would you chose?

Tomás Q. Morin’s poems have appeared in New England Review, Boulevard, and Narrative. His first book, A Larger Country, was the winner of 2012 American Poetry Review / Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry. Tomás seemed excited to share not only about his new book, but also about himself and his career as a writer. Exchanging emails from his home in Texas, we discussed A Larger Country, as well as the business of being a poet.

SEAMUS CUNNINGHAM: What would you like people to know about yourself?

TOMAS MORIN: Thinking about what I would like people to know about myself is difficult, because I have no idea what someone might be interested in knowing. I mean, is there anyone that would care to know that I have a deep love for the blues of Son House, miniature donkeys, and Clint Eastwood’s orangutan movies? Or that I dislike mathematics, but admire the beauty of geometry, think that the fingerprints of God are in Pi, that parallel lines elegantly extending into infinity and never touching are as perfect as any two couplets by Pope? I have no idea if anyone would want to know any of this.

CUNNINGHAM: I would sure like to know that! How did you hear about your book winning the APR / Honickman Book Prize?

MORIN: I received a phone call in January from Elizabeth Scanlon of American Poetry Review. When she first introduced herself, I mistakenly thought that the call was about a poem they had accepted for publication. Then, I realized I didn’t have any poems submitted to APR at the time. Confusion on my part ensued. This all happened in the span of about two seconds, by the way, which explains why I was at a literal loss for words when she told me the reason for her call, to let me know I had won the prize. Trying to process my false assumption and then the unbelievable information she had just told me resulted in my not saying anything for a few seconds. It wasn’t until she asked if I was still on the line that I kind of snapped to and rejoined the conversation. She was very kind and patiently talked me back into coherence.

CUNNINGHAM: What motivated you to write A Larger Country?

MORIN: When I started out writing the poems in A Larger Country, I had no idea they would one day end up in the book. Honestly, I never knew this book would exist until it did. Even before I started my MFA program at Texas State University, I had fallen in love with not just making poems, but with the idea of a collection being more than just a selection of the best poems written over a certain number of years. William Carlos Williams and Yeats and Lorca were important models in this respect. While A Larger Country is my first published book, it’s not the first book I ever assembled. Counting my MFA thesis, I think there were three other books I put together. While they were awful and will thankfully never see the light of day, they were important because I was playing with the book as a form, and trying to learn my way around it in the way I played with the sestina and other forms.

CUNNINGHAM: What do you think readers may take from your book?

MORIN: Always first and foremost, I hope readers find pleasure in what I’ve written. Beyond that, if they find any sort of meaning or personal significance or maybe a different way of looking at the world, then that’s just icing on the cake.

CUNNINGHAM: Have you done any public appearances for your books? How were those?

MORIN: I had a launch party in Austin, TX, which was wonderful. It was great to see so many people from different parts of my life gathered in one place. I’ve also read in Houston and Minneapolis and at a festival recently. I found the crowds to be great at all the places I’ve read. Next year I’ll be doing a book tour of the West Coast with a couple of other debut poets, the fabulous James Arthur and Natalie Diaz.

CUNNINGHAM: In your poem titled “Idiom of a Hero,” you write:

“They represent, I fancy, a version of heaven;
We commit them to memory, which is a larger country.” (55)
This, I assume, is where the title comes from. What does “a larger country” mean to you?

MORIN: Memory is a larger country than, say, the United States, or Italy, or any number of places because within our minds we can, through our experiences, create and archive whole worlds that far exceed the physical world in terms of size and variety. What’s more, the countries of our mind can be more permanent than the physical world, which is always in such a state of flux. This is good news. Before age and disease and time begin to challenge the permanence of the worlds in our memories, we can visit these places any time we want. I ask you, how could someone not consider this a type of heaven?

CUNNINGHAM: What are some of the inspirations for the ideas?

MORIN: I’m often inspired to write after reading a story about suffering or cruelty or injustice. Many times my poems are my way of trying to figure out how people can do treat each other as terrible [sic] as they do. Even though I know the answer—because we’re people—it’s a question I keep returning to. As a lifelong optimist, I still hold out hope for our species that we might one day evolve into a more decent, kind version of where we’re at right now.

CUNNINGHAM: You have many interesting poems in your new book. Two I remember are “Our Prophet” and “Winter.” In these poems, what are the messages you wanted readers to take out of them?

MORIN: There was no message I had for readers in those poems or any others. All I ever hope when I send a poem out in the world is that someone will like its music. That kind of pleasure is always first and foremost. Beyond that, if the poem makes someone reflect on themselves or the world, or key lime pie, then that’s icing on the cake.

Johnathon Williams: poet, programmer, editor, parent, and author of The Road to Happiness. With poems such as “Mossing” and essays on the hungry undead of Wal-Mart, Williams offers a quaint-but-slanted perspective to flyover-state life. The landscapes he portrays make you feel as if you were growing up with him and going through his trials with him. The language Williams chooses brings to mind the classic writers of the Twentieth Century: classic, tasteful, and full of genuine intention. On the phone, his voice has a charming Southern twang (he was born in Eudora, Mississippi and lives in Arkansas), as he gives a congenial interview discussing his passion for poetry, the challenges of getting published, and the everyday struggles of being a writer.

MCKENZEE GREENE: So, when you were writing The Road to Happiness, was its intention to be published?

JOHNATHON WILLIAMS: Getting a book published is fairly a crapshoot. The way it generally works—nowadays anyway, if you want to get a book of poetry published—what you do is: first, you write a book of poetry, then you start sending it to contests. You print out 20 copies, and then you write 20 checks for these entry fees, for like 15-20 bucks each. That is really the standard procedure for submitting a book of poetry. So it gets expensive in a hurry. The average cost is like 20 bucks per book, even if you just send it to ten contests a year, that’s 200 dollars.

GREENE: That’s crazy.

WILLIAMS: It is crazy! But that is what almost everyone does, especially if you come out of an MFA program. One of the reasons they do that is because it’s so hard, you know, to get creative writing teaching jobs, and those jobs are so hard to come by, you want to be able to say on your CV that you won a big prize.

GREENE: On your website you note, “My first book, The Road to Happiness, just hit the shelves. It’s a book of poetry. Try not to hold that against me.” Are you talking about how difficult it is to make yourself a poet, or are you speaking about the general stigma that is associated with it?

WILLIAMS: Both, I guess. It’s such a strange thing to do these days. Writing any sort of literature these days, whether it’s poetry or fiction, or even personal essays. Hell, you could put the same amount of time learning to program iPhone apps and probably retire before you’re 35. It’s an odd thing to do, but particularly poetry. If you think people barely read literary novels, you can multiply that times a thousand when it comes to poetry. Nobody reads poetry! So, to be a grown man who is responsible for two kids and a wife, and to have like…student loan debt because I just spent four years writing a book of poetry… Right? That’s ridiculous. It has to be! And I’m going to do it again, and lots of people do, too.

GREENE: It’s such a beautiful thing, though. I’m only a freshman in college, and we read a lot of poetry. We read quite a bit of Robert Frost, and I saw there was a similarity between the two. How do you feel about being associated with a poet like Robert Frost? I read your book before I read the foreword, and I noticed that Katrina Vandenburg had noted that.

WILLIAMS: Well, for one thing, I love Robert Frost, so it’s very flattering for anyone to ever compare my work to his. That does wonders for my ego! It’s one of those things I try not to think about, in terms of…I know who my favorites are, and obviously your favorites always influence you, but I try not to think too much about it directly. I think that if I’m afraid of the juju. I try not to think about my own process, or where it comes from. I don’t know if that makes sense, but I think that trying to understand that will, in some way, ruin it for me. There’s obviously a craft, and one of the things you do as a writer is you practice, and practice, and practice. It’s just like being a carpenter, and I believe that. I’m not one of those people who likes to make it all too serious. At the same time, there is something mysterious, and I don’t understand…and if I do, I feel like I’ll stop doing it.

GREENE: My favorite of your poems was “Mossing.” My favorite line was, “A man in the city pays twenty bucks a pound, one burlap sack stuffed full buys baby’s medicine. Black pines edge the pasture where families pull apart.”

Was that something that was happening within your community, or was it a reflection of the culture in your community?

WILLIAMS: Well, some of my relatives did that. So when I grew up, my father was the editor of the town newspaper, and my mom was—I don’t know what they call them now, back then they would call them beauticians, I think now they call them hairstylists—in this little southern town we lived in. And, they did ok. We weren’t rich or anything, but my brother and I always got a lot of toys on Christmas. But, we had these relatives who lived without running water, on dirt roads that were so bad you’d have to park and walk a mile because you didn’t want to risk your car. A couple of times, my father and I would go out I wanted to watch cartoons. I remember a couple of Saturday mornings where my father would take my brother and I would get out early out of bed, and go out in the woods and help them. And what we would do is literally gather moss. My brother and I were indoor kids, and we didn’t want to do it; we lived near the outdoors, but all we wanted to do was stay in and play video games. Here we are, it’s like being drug into another century! We are going to spend all day in the woods with people who are gathering moss to sell.

GREENE: You programmed a popular Safari extension called Tweedact. Did you teach yourself programming, or was it a passion that’s secondary to writing?

WILLIAMS: It was definitely secondary, and I did teach myself. My dad got me a Commodore 64, one of those computers you had to plug into a television. When I was a kid, the only way to do anything was basically to learn basic programming before graphical interfaces and all that nice stuff. And I was always much more interested in books than in writing. In a perfect world, I would never program anything ever again. It is interesting, and it’s not too bad. It’s not digging in a coal mine, so I try not to complain about it too much. When I was a kid, it was like solving a puzzle. And when I got older, I tried making a living as a writer.

I was a freelance journalist and a newspaper reporter for a while. I did quite a bit of writing about technology because the tech magazines would pay more. And then when you have a family, it’s so hard to begin as a writer. You have to be so talented, or so lucky, or some combination of both, really.

I kept up kind of with programming, and over a period of time, when I saw where the newspaper industry was heading, I went back to get my MFA. I knew that, number one, getting my MFA was an incredibly irresponsible thing to do for a person responsible for a family, just financially. There’s so much time and money, especially when you’re doing poetry. So I decided to stop freelance writing for money and start programming for money because the pay is so much better. So, at the same time, I do…part of me does like programming, like fun little ideas. I just thought Tweedact would be fun to build, so I built it, and put it out there, people see it, and then they’ll have you pay to do something like that. So I don’t know. I guess the short answer is that I have really mixed feelings about programming. Mostly because, you know, I spend almost all my time now doing that. Because it’s how I get paid! But, I would much rather spend all of my time reading and writing.

GREENE: You mentioned your kids. Would you encourage them to immerse themselves in a world of writing and poetry?

WILLIAMS: Absolutely not. I hope they all grow up to be investment bankers. That sounds cynical, and doesn’t seem completely sincere. My dad was a writer. He worked for a newspaper and that’s how he made money. But he wanted to write novels. And he would do that, but never published one. My mom was an artist—I mean, she was a hairstylist—but every night she would come home and do these amazing pen-and-ink drawings when I was a kid. She would win prizes at the state fair. I knew that he would rather be writing, and she would rather be doing a painting. That was their passion, and then they had these jobs that they had to do to make money. But they had this passion that they knew could never be fulfilled. It must be so frustrating. I know I certainly feel that way, and I know that they did. And, of course it’s rewarding—poetry, art. It adds a dimension to your life that you can’t imagine living without. But, at the same time, you imagine your kids growing up, and living with that frustration, and worrying about money at the same time. Of course I want them to be passionate about something and have a full understanding of the world, but having some interest in some kind of art like poetry or music. But at the same time, our family is overdue for an investment banker. If for no other reason than the next generation can afford to be artists.

GREENE: Do you find on your literary journal, Linebreak, which you co-edit, that there’s a breadth of poetry?

WILLIAMS: We get great stuff at Linebreak. And we turn away good poems all the time because we only do one a week. That’s only 52 a year, and we get an enormous amount of submissions. So, we do turn away a lot of really good poems. We turn away poems that I have no doubt will be published someplace else, and I’m sad that they can’t, but at the same time we get a ton of crap. We get things from prisoners—not that prisoners can’t write great poems—, we get things from people who have not studied their craft at all, things from people who haven’t read a lot of Linebreak at all, and it’s just, they have these sort of unstructured lamentations about what to write in their lives. And I know from other editors that’s really common.

GREENE: Where did the inspiration from Linebreak come from?

WILLIAMS: Oh, just the fact that, at the time—it’s actually kind of still true—but at the time, every other online journal just sucked. I mean, it wasn’t that they were posting bad poetry; there are lots of online journals publishing good poetry, but in terms of just like, how the journals were designed, and how they were presented. How they worked as online publications was just pathetic! Awful! It’s still a problem with poetry, to some degree.

Then and now a lot of online journals still publish issues. Right? Like, four times a year… Still online journals, four times a year, two times a year, come out with like 20 poems. Which makes a lot of sense on paper, like it makes a lot of sense to do 20 poems for an issue, because paper is expensive! If you save all the poems up, you’ll be able to print one issue. You can save money in shipping. Because, as a technology, that’s how paper works. So to wait six months online, and to throw a bunch of stuff out there at once, uh, is just silly. Issues are unnecessary online, in a traditional sense. Why not post a poem as you get a poem? It just makes sense.

GREENE: Right. Do you feel like the success of poetry will be greater on the Internet than publishing on paper?

WILLIAMS: You know, I don’t know. Poetry is so strange. It should be…and you can argue that poetry should be this perfect literary form in a digital age. It’s short, incredibly brief. It could be read on a smartphone, or whatever. Or shipped on a Kindle, all that good stuff. And yet, nobody reads it. At the same time, the best-selling books of the last many years were the Harry Potter series! Which is MASSIVE. Those are big books, right? But, I don’t know if we’re going to know if it will open up to a number of readers, and I don’t really know if that matters. Poetry has always been kind of a niche concern. I don’t know. I guess  [in the] 19th Century there were best sellers of poetry, but those people were really bored. [laughs].

GREENE: I have one more question for you. If you could make a difference in anyone’s life with your writing, in what way would you like to do that?

WILLIAMS: Oh, God! This is going to sound so selfish but it’s absolutely true. If I could make a difference in anyone’s life with my writing, it would be in my own! So that I could find some way to spend the rest of my life doing nothing but reading and writing.

In his debut book of poems, Deadbeat, Jay Baron Nicorvo shares his struggles coming to terms with his relationships with his father and his transition into becoming a father himself. It is pure, raw, and cutthroat poetry. The first deadbeat dad was none other than God, he says. With dreams of his son becoming a great man and him being the best father, he’s set his sights high, and Deadbeat is one of the first steps to reaching those goals. We spoke over email, he in Michigan and me in New York.

MAR SHAY HINES: As soon as I opened your book, I was enticed to read more because of this quote from Fyodor Dostoevsky: “These young men do not understand that the sacrifice of life is, perhaps, the easiest of all sacrifices.” What do you think the sacrifices of life are and why?

JAY BARON NICORVO: That’s a wonderful question, Mar Shay, and not an easy one to answer.

The Dostoevsky epigraph offers a number of interpretations, but prime among them, for me, is the pointed commentary it makes on masculine irresponsibility, which is one of the great themes of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. When we’re young—though it doesn’t get much better as we age!—we have difficulty understanding how our decisions determine events. Often, we simply choose not to do things, or we’re incapable, for whatever reason, of making right decisions, because it’s easier. A bad choice, or a choice, good or bad, we fail to make can have consequences that shape, or warp, the rest of our lives.

HINES: What connects this quote to your purpose in Deadbeat?

NICORVO: My father made a choice not to support his three sons. That choice was, in some ways, the easier choice. It would’ve been much harder to have to work to provide for three boys, and to maintain relationships with them in the face of a difficult divorce.


Thanks to my education, I now know how a single-parent upbringing imperils the children raised therein. My fear, for a long time, was that I would do the same thing to my child; have him or her, and bolt. The hardest part for me about writing Deadbeat, the thing that took the longest, was figuring out how to sympathize with the character of Deadbeat, who runs through all the poems. The easier choice for me would’ve simply been to damn him, to sacrifice his character, like an effigy.

It was much more difficult—a ten-year odyssey of revision and rewriting—to bring his character to life in a way that didn’t simply sacrifice him but, rather, sympathetically showed that in the long run, the easy choice in the moment turns out to be damning over a lifetime. It damned my father, damned his sons to poverty and all its tragic trappings. The easy choice was harder on us all.

Dostoyevsky is saying that young men have a more difficult time understanding this, and, looking back as old men, we know, through experience, that a bad, easy choice made about a big, life-changing decision can kill us then and there—in spirit at least—and we become like the walking dead, brokenhearted: deadbeat. Making the hard choice in those moments—sacrificing ease for the sake of life—can save us, and others.

HINES: What influenced you to write the powerful poem, “Child Support Hearing”?

NICORVO: That’s a very personal poem, about as confessional, as autobiographical, as my poetry gets. I last saw my biological father 26 years ago at a child-support hearing; that scene inspired the poem. The man responsible for my life, and the lives of my two younger brothers, showed up to court looking homeless to convince the presiding judge to reduce his monthly child-support payments. It worked. I was ten years old, and in addition to it being the last time I saw my father, it was also the first time I’d ever seen him without his toupee!


HINES: At the end of “A Long, Precarious Walk”, you include “for John Skoyles.” Who is John Skoyles and what is his significance to you?

NICORVO: In intimate company, I sometimes find myself saying, “I’ve been unlucky in fathers but lucky in father figures.” John Skoyles, one of the finest people I’ve ever met, is a poet and memoirist. He was the chair of the writing, literature, and publishing department at Emerson College when I was earning my MFA there, and John treated me more like a son than a student. That poem, “A Long, Precarious Walk,” which I’ve come to see as a kind of parable of my prosody, came out of a conversation John and I had at Remington’s of Boston next door to the college. He took me to dinner, told me stories about Denis Johnson and Robert Creeley, and offered me sound advice on everything from writing to hygiene.

Which reminds me. I came into his office one day, and before I had my bag off my shoulder he asked what size sport coat I wore. I said I didn’t know. I didn’t own any sport coats. I was 24 and grew up hardscrabble, working-class. I’d never owned a sport coat.

From behind his desk, he told me, “Close the door. Put your bag down.” When I did, he said, “On the back of the door are a couple of sport coats. I want you to try them on.” I did. There was one I liked, a camelhair blazer with three brown buttons. I shrugged it on, buttoned all three buttons, and stood before him.

He said, “You never button the bottom button. That’s the never button.” He came round his desk and pointed at the three buttons in turn, top to bottom, saying, “Always, sometimes, never.” He brushed off the shoulders. “Got it?” I nodded. He said, “I want you to have this one.” Then we sat down and talked about my poems, and he told me that when my poetry got too loose, I had a tendency to come off sounding like Don Rickles.

I went home and looked up this “Don Rickles,” and I spent the next ten years tightening the loose screws in my verse.

HINES: You stated, “For my Father whomever you are and for my son whomever you may.” What would you tell men who are becoming fathers? What did you tell yourself before becoming a father?

NICORVO: Do your damnedest to be sure you’re ready for fatherhood, because if you’re not and you fail in your duties, you’re going to fuck it up for everyone, everyone in the family, everyone in the community, everyone in the country. That’s not hyperbole. When a father doesn’t support his kids, in this country at least, the responsibility often falls to the government.

HINES: What was the force behind Deadbeat becoming your debut?

NICORVO: Madness. I wrote and rewrote it off and on for a decade. I didn’t want to be the Don Rickles of the poetry world! If I were sane, I would’ve given up on it much sooner.

HINES: How did you come up with the titles “The Loved Dead,” “Housebroken,” “The Lifeglass Overturned,” “The Land of Love-No-More,” and “Cajole?” They remind me of different types of living environments.

NICORVO: Along with an “Acknowledgements” page, a lot of poetry collections these days include a “Notes” section, where the poet explicitly states allusions and lists sources cribbed. Part of me hates those notes sections, though I read them. I hear therein the insecurity and the insincerity of a gloat. James Joyce’s Ulysses, like Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” has generated a wealth of academic criticism and scholarship. Even Joyce’s friends urged him to write an explanation of the book. His response: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that’s the only way of ensuring one’s immortality.”

This is all to say that I wanted the titles and epigraphs (and even the titles of the books from which the epigraphs come) to be suggestive of themes in Deadbeat, while at the same time offering a roadmap to a few of my influences without me having to say, “You, go here. Read this. Ain’t I clever?”

HINES: You used Psalm 22, “Why hast thou forsaken me? Why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?” Did you use it based on religious values or as if it was a piece of poetry in a book?

NICORVO: Both! I was raised Catholic, though I’m now a devout heretic, and the King James is pure poetry. But I was using that psalm to suggest that the first deadbeat dad was none other than God.

HINES: How did you and Matthea Harvey choose that piece of artwork as your cover photo? That photo speaks volumes.

NICORVO: When the book was accepted, the Four Way Books publisher, Martha Rhodes, asked me to recommend art for the cover. I wanted an image that, like the poems in Deadbeat, and like the central character himself, came close to capturing a reflection expressed by Stanley Kunitz: “Years ago I came to the realization that the most poignant of all lyric tensions stems from the awareness that we are living and dying at once. To embrace such knowledge and yet to remain compassionate and whole—that is the consummation of the endeavor of art.”

I thought of Matthea, who’s a friend. She has a fascination with all things small, and I knew, from conducting a public interview with her, that she was working on a series of poems with close-up images of tiny things in lieu of poem titles. I begged her to take pictures of little Deadbeat. She agreed and went to work. Four or so beautiful images came out of the shoot, she snapping the pictures while her husband, Rob Casper, played puppeteer. The cover image was the one Matthea liked best, and Martha and I agreed, but the other images that didn’t make the cut are wonderful, too. Thankfully, they’ve had a second life, first as a collaboration we did for Abe’s Penny, a literary journal on postcards that pairs poetry with images, and then as background images for the website I cobbled together for myself.

HINES: How is it working with your wife, Thisbe Nissen?

NICORVO: It’s blessed. Thisbe saves me from myself. She’s my best friend, my first reader, a writer of the highest order, a selfless teacher, a beautiful woman, and she’s a wonderful mother to our son. If not for her, I’d be lonely, broke, selling cars by day and drinking myself to sleep at night. I’m not sure how I got so lucky.

New York poet Matthew Thorburn is the author of poetry books Subject to Change and Every Possible Blue. Matthew took time out of his busy schedule for a phone interview about his new collection as well as This Time Tomorrow, his a book-length poem. Over the phone, his voice calm and relaxed, we discussed his writing process, his new collection, where he draws his inspiration from, what it means to be a poet, and what it is like to live in the city.

KRISTA LIUZZI: In your poems you mention a lot about the city; what it’s like to live there and having it as your inspiration.

MATTHEW THORBURN: I enjoy it a lot. I grew up in the Midwest, in Michigan, and I moved out here in 1999 when I started grad school to study business. It was a big change for me, but I really enjoy it so I stayed here. I have been writing about it quite a bit in this book and also in my other writings. My inspiration to write comes from the many different neighborhoods and the things that catch your eye.

LIUZZI: If there were one thing that you could take with you from Michigan and put in New York City what would it be?

THORBURN: I guess one thing would be the people that I know there. These include my friends and family. Specifically, my parents, cousins, aunts, uncles and other people I see a couple times a year still live there.

LIUZZI: You are currently working on two new projects. Are they like the poems that are in this book or are they different?

THORBURN: I have some different things that I am working on. I have a book coming out soon called This Time Tomorrow. That it is almost done. The book consists of poems based on traveling and experiences in other countries and cultures. It all takes place in Japan, Iceland, and China. It is very different from my newest book. I am working now on a book-length poem that takes place in the city, mostly in the Bronx, Riverdale, and New Jersey, over the course of a year. It has been different for me to work on this project in sections. It is a poem that is approximately fifty pages long

LIUZZI: How do you write? Old school with a typewriter, or do you go modern and sit down with a computer? Or do you sit down and write it out longhand? If you write longhand do you use arrows to move work around?

THORBURN: Usually I start off with those first few ideas, in a notebook or a piece of paper. Once I have a few of those then I will move to the computer and start typing it up. I really like to see the line breaks. So, for me it really helps to see it in types, and where the lines are and the breaks. Definitely the line breaks are easier to do on the computer, and then you can move the word up or down. Like cut and pasting stuff.

LIUZZI: How do you think about the details? What I mean is: do you start big and work small, or the opposite?

THORBURN: Usually there are small details that trigger the poem for me—for instance, misreading that “Men’s wear” sign at Macy’s as “Men swear.” And then as I’m working on the poem I’ll start to see how those details fit together into something larger and (hopefully) take on a bigger meaning.

LIUZZI: Men do swear. That’s funny. Did you have any problems or challenges publishing this book?

THORBURN: This was my second book. With my first book I sent out to contests like most people do. I forget how many, but quite a few. I think within about 12 months’ cycle of sending it to a bunch of different contests…one of them finally won and found a place to be published. Then this book; I sent it out in different versions to different contest and some reading periods… I think for about five years it took for different versions…to find a publisher. It was a finalist a few times; it came close to winning a prize, but it never got picked up. All that time I wrote my other book.

LIUZZI: There is a poem that you wrote called “Dark Chocolate Cake with Dark Chocolate Pudding.” What’s the story behind that one?

THORBURN: The cake is made-up in a way (sorry to say). But I liked the sound of it repeating word chocolate in there. The poem itself was based on going to a very crowded, holiday party where I didn’t know people too well. So it inspired this poem.

LIUZZI: When you get writer’s block, how do you cope? How do you relate to writer’s block?

THORBURN: There are a couple of things that I do. I heard once that, “you don’t have to be writing all the time.” So I try to remember to do that a lot. Even thought I should be working on something. Other advice I heard was to sit down and start writing; even if you write horrible stuff you are still exercising muscles, and eventually you will write something good. These days I work a 9-to-5 job. I commute back and forth to the Bronx and Manhattan. I wish that I had more time to write but usually I’ve got something in mind or something to revise. With the book-length poem, that is always something I can dig into. But these days, that is something I am not [able to] deal with, because I have so much going on. But if I had more [time], these tools would be what I would use. Also going to readings and hearing other people’s poems. Listening can be very inspiring, if you hear something really good, you start thinking of the lines or the images.

LIUZZI: How long have you been writing poetry? Have you always written poetry?

THORBURN: I started writing poems when I was in high school, in my senior year. I have been writing since then for about 20 years. I have been writing since that time. In college, I had to write fiction for a while along with short stories. I really didn’t like that so much so I switched back over to poetry. In the last five to six years I have been trying to write book reviews and essays trying to see what that is like. But for me I think that my interest would be in poetry.

LIUZZI: When you are finished with a book how do you promote it? Do you use social networking websites, or does your editor this help promote your books?

THORBURN: The press has their own website, which is pretty basic these days. They send out flyers in the mail to bunch of people about the book. There is a little bit of social media. I used to talk to different poets I know and people who read the book. I do have a website where I blog, not a very updated blog, but I keep people informed about updates. The main thing for me though would be for me to get book out there would be a reading from the book so people could hear the poems.

LIUZZI: You said you were working on a project where you mention “China, Iceland, and Japan.” Have you ever travelled to those places?

THORBURN: Those were places that I actually travel to. Later on when I came home, I wrote about them; in a way I am remembering about the trip. As I was writing the poem, I would be doing research about the places to make sure I had the facts right.

LIUZZI: What’s the best part of editing? What do you like most about it?

THORBURN: That to me is the best part. Where you are in the middle of writing something and it is quite not there but you are revising. But, as you have said, I move things around. I tend to write, I start a poem, and I have different thoughts that I write down. Normally it is just bits and pieces that I fit together. Rather than writing a poem from the beginning and editing straight through like a rough draft.

As far as revising, I found a lot with writing this book-length poem, it is about cutting things out and trying to be tougher on what stuff I like. Like maybe I like this line but it won’t add to the poem. Things like that, so it is just getting the heart of the poem and what the poem is.

Poet, collage artist, and classical pianist Camille Martin spent her childhood and early adult years in Louisiana. She currently resides in Toronto, Canada. Ms. Martin is the author of four full-length poetry collections: Sesame Kiosk, Codes of Public Sleep, Sonnets, and her latest release, Looms. Her training as a musician gives her poetry a unique flavor. She feels there is definitely a connection between language and music and says that when she writes poetry, she is “aware of trying to make the language sing.” Camille writes “for the sheer joy and pleasure of the sounds of poetic language”. In an interview conducted over several email exchanges from her home in Canada, we discussed what the word “looms” means to her and her training as a classical musician.

ROSENTHAL: Looms are tools for weaving threads into tapestries. Looms can also mean the imminent arrival of something just out of sight. What does the term “looms” represent to you? Why did you choose this title for your collection of poems?

MARTIN: In Looms I began to write narratives that wove together disparate strands that still somehow blended within the poem’s tapestry. I liked the double meaning of the word “looms,” which suggests the possibility for expanding meanings. That double-ness makes me curious about how the two meanings of “looms” might relate. In a similar way, weaving together in one poem images from different realms—the altitude of the moon and a tightrope walker, for example—might cause a reader to wonder how they relate. And the thought process of the reader is part of the poem, too!

ROSENTHAL: You were trained as a classical musician. In what ways does your musical background influence or contribute to your poetic style of writing?

MARTIN: To me, language and music are closely related. Even ordinary speech is musical: think of the way your voice makes a melody with rhythm as you talk. A musician could even notate ordinary speech as music—and in fact many songwriters and opera composers pay close attention to speech accents, inflections, and rhythms. When I write poetry, on some level I’m aware of trying to make the language sing.

ROSENTHAL: You have been described as both a visual artist and a collage artist? Is there a particular genre of visual arts that appeals to you most?

MARTIN: As a visual artist, I work primarily in collage. I like the way an object is transformed when it’s juxtaposed with another object—for example ancient fossils and semaphore flags.

When confronted with such a juxtaposition, the human mind does what it does best: try to figure out what one might have to do with the other. A narrative might begin to take shape, or maybe a philosophical idea. Another possibility is to allow the two things to stand without trying to bridge the gap—to simply enjoy the work’s strange or playful qualities.

ROSENTHAL: You have said that the “woven tales” within Looms are “like parables with infinitely deferred lessons”. What lessons would you like the reader to take away from your book?

MARTIN: My favorite poems don’t so much convey lessons—“morals of the story” or nuggets of truth—as possibilities. I read in order to think, to follow the ripples of meaning that expand from a word, phrase, or sentence in the poem, and to see how one thought leads to the next. And I read for the pleasure of poetic language: its patterns and surprises of sound, image, and idea. And I’m also aware of the emotions that I experience while I read poetry.

ROSENTHAL: Can you tell me more about your poem, “They will take my island”? Who or what exactly does “they” refer to?

MARTIN: That poem was commissioned by a poet friend, Paul Vermeersch. He asked several poets to write a poem beginning with the words, “They will take my island,” which is the title of a painting by Arshile Gorky. Beyond the first line, the poets had complete freedom to write what they wished, and to interpret “they” in their own way. In my poem, I never offer a fixed identity for “they,” so that readers might play with their own interpretations.

ROSENTHAL: What significance does the last line in your poem beginning, “Where peasants now hack at tough clods,” have? Does a blue banner with a crescent moon have an underlying meaning?

MARTIN: The particular color and emblem of the banner don’t have symbolic significance for me. For the purposes of the poem, I was thinking of what might be on the flag of a medieval kingdom, and the crescent moon appears on heraldry, coins, and flags in many different cultures, throughout history.
But come to think of it, the moon is a common literary symbol for change—think of Juliet admonishing Romeo: “swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon.” And the poem as a whole deals with inconstant history, announced by the first lines: what was once a recreational wharf is now a field plowed by peasants.
So—thanks to your question I see something new in this poem!

ROSENTHAL: Can you explain some of your thoughts surrounding “Nostalgia came later”? I was particularly struck by “We deduce that who we are depends on how we ask the question and who asks it” and “whispering a rumor isn’t the same as inheriting it”.

MARTIN: In this poem I was thinking about evolution and the question of nurture/nature: to what extent are we the result of traits inherited from distant evolutionary ancestors, versus traits that we’ve acquired through experience? Who are we and why? I don’t think that our human qualities can be entirely explained by evolution—for example, the self-conscious thought that you quote from the poem, problematizing the question of who we are. On the other hand, human behaviors such as tribalism (the “guarded terror of the other”) likely result from our evolution.

Readers might interpret the poem in different ways, but this is what I was thinking while writing it.

ROSENTHAL: Does your poetry usually begin as a single thought or phrase in your mind that you want to further explore, or does it begin more as a collection of thoughts or ideas?

MARTIN: That’s a very good question. Sometimes a poem begins as a single idea. An example: I took a walk to Sugar Beach on Lake Ontario—so-called because of the view of a nearby sugar refinery. I began the poem as a description of the scene, from the white sand to the raw sugar transferred by crane from a barge to the refinery. I wasn’t sure where the poem was going.
Then I started remembering as a child the smell of burning sugar cane fields. So I wrote that into the poem.

As the poem progressed, it became something more complex: a meditation on the nature of memory. I was fascinated by Sugar Beach triggering a distant memory and the associations my mind was making in the process.