INTERVIEW WITH

WALT MCDONALD

by

Chris Ellery

The following interview with Walt McDonald was conducted by mail and at Walt McDonald's home in Lubbock July-August 1995.

C: You started out writing fiction, I believe. Could you tell me about that, and about how and why you turned to poetry?

W: I began to want to write fiction about my senior year [at Texas Tech]. I stayed on at Tech for a Master's degree because my entry into pilot training was about a year after graduation. I started writing my first novel then. I didn't know what I was doing. I was just writing a long piece of narrative. So I was thinking fiction for years and years. After going to the Air Force Academy and beding sent off to Iowa a couple of years later, I took fiction writing courses at the University of Iowa, where I did my Ph.D. I never even wanted to take a poetry writing course while I was there, though I've kicked myself ever since.

I came to poetry late, as a middle-aged Air Force pilot. After some of my friends went off to Vietnam, and one was shot down, then another, I felt a need to say something to them, or about them. I was writing fiction in those years, and I turned to poems as a way of saying some things that I couldn't say in short stores.

C: How can you say some things in poetry that you can't say in fiction?

W: I don't know. It wasn't a conscious decision, it was just scribbling at night, and the things that I was scribbling were not going into short stories. And they weren't a diary—I don't keep a diary, and I don't keep a journal. I had read a lot of poems, naturally, going for a Ph.D. in English and two or three of my best friends at the Air Force Academy were poets. I had read their stuff and liked it and talked with them about the craft, not intending at that time to become a poet myself.

My first stumbling attempts were like letters to the dead, or to someone unable to hear, like a poem I wrote for my young daughter, when I got my own orders to Vietnam.

A few years ago, I bumped into an old buddy from the Air Force. He asked me why I started writing poems. We had been talking about years ago when we flew together—the dog fights in the sky, night flights under stars and in bad weather, the thunderstorms we had flown around, and through. I said well, maybe a little of all of that turned me to poems—or probably all of it.

C: Would you tell me about your Vietnam experience? What kind of missions did you fly?

W: I was a pilot, but in Vietnam I had a ground job. That's something that I'm really not interested in talking about, if that's OK with you. I write about Vietnam, but all my poems are inventions, they're little fictions. I didn't set out to chronicle my life. You and I both have friends that like to talk about their war experience. I have more friends that don't. I'm one of those.

C: You said that there were some things you couldn't say in short stories. In his foreward to your collection of stories, A Band of Brothers, Bob Flynn says essentially the same thing about poetry: "Poetry, trapped in its very form, lends refinement to horror . . . or a pattern of pleasure to meaningless pain. Rhythmical, systematic, poetry cannot capture the sprawling chaos of war."

W: I don't question his right to those assertions, especially about "the sprawling chaos of war." I think with awe of poems that express, with "terrible beauty," the horror of war: Wilford Owen's "Dulce et Decorum est Pro Patria Mori," for example; Jarrell's "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner," Dickey's "The Firebombing."

C: Flynn's comment about the effect of form is very interesting to me. Would you comment on your sense of form?

W: Generally, I'm drawn to form, the "sound and sense" of any made thing. Haven't we all read tons of bad poems in the form of sonnets and sestinas and blank verse, and tons of bad prose chopped up to look like poems? Isn't there a thrill when we read a poem so well made that simple words explode? Rewriting is more than half the excitement of writing.

C: Your poems look very "formal" on the page. They cluster into stanzas, normally. Why arrange your lines this way instead of into, say, syntactical units of varying numbers of lines.

W: Obviously, the old forms are profoundly moving when they work well. But I don't often work in those forms. The kinds of poems I write feel better to me with emphasis, so repetition of sound within a line or within a group of two or three lines are more emphatic, more pleasurable to me. When I began to read James Dickey, I thought, "I have never seen anyone make better stanza breaks than this dude." The "Heaven of Animals," for example, about halfway through it, talking about the killer cats and how for them heaven couldn't be the place it was without blood, Dickey writes,

And their descent

Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years

In a sovereign floating of joy.

That subtle little white space is a masterpiece. When I saw that, I had a poetic conversion. I thought, "Form—that's where it works." Because if he had just had that in a poem without stanza breaks, it would've worked, but for me there was this fun discovery of an extra little piece of white space that imitated that floating through the air. That's marvelous. That's when I really began to love and understand the potential for stanzas, even in free verse. So I work at it. I change stanzas when shaping a poem probably more than I do simple line breaks. I can't make—and I don't think Dickey makes—every stanza break as stunning and thrilling as that one, but that' always the goal.

C: You describe your poems as "little fictions." Would you elaborate on your use of persona and voice. Should we consider any of you poems "autobiographical"—I mean in a fairly literal sense? Do you really have as many uncles as you seem to, for example?

W: Many of the first poems I remember liking early on were persona poems or dramatic monologues: Tennyson's "Ulysses," several by Robert Browning, Eliot's "Prufrock," Dickey's "The Lifeguard." When I began—what else!—I aped my betters. But even from the start, I never planned to write a personal poem. Sometimes in the process, I would find that the voice wasn't Walt's, but Caliban's, or Goliath's, or a soldier's I called Guy Fawkes.

Over time, I began to realize that every poem is an invention, a made (and made-up) thing. That's the wonder of writing poems, for me: every poem is personal, yes—but every poem is also a persona poem, a little fiction.

I try as much as I can to make every poem an experience to feel. If it's about dying, I try to open the experience so that people who read it can nod their heads and say, "Yes! I see. I've been there." In no way do I feel that poetry—or fiction—is a way of conveying my own experience to a reader so that he or she will say, "Wow, you mean you actually did that?" Experience is valuable for what it is; then the writing takes over. I am not there, frank and undisguised, in any poem.

When I ran across what James Dickey said about the possibilities of invention and metaphor and voice, I felt liberated, thrilled that what I had been doing on my own seemed somehow extremely valid. As far as I'm concerned, Dickey is right, and his insights about these aspects are brilliant.

When the persona is there in a poem, and the mask is in place, the lyric and narrative can work; but the actual person I am is not there in the poem, or what I did—not an actual pilot, or a real boy leaping from trees. Nothing could matter less. My privilege as a writer is to try writing so vividly that whoever reads it will feel it was this way, had to be this way, it was sure enough this way for them, when they read the piece.

Somebody asked me once what year was it when I took off and lived on a ranch in order to write the poems in Rafting the Brazos and other books. I didn't know whether to feel grateful to him for hinting they ring authentic, or to sit down on the curb and flip twigs into the rainwater draining away in the gutter. I told him that although my daddy had been a cowboy in West Texas seventy years ago, the only steers I herd are in my head. He said, "Oh," and looked sadly deflated, as if he had just heard a friend confess a crime. Because he is my friend, himself a Texan, I reminded him that, growing up in West Texas as we had, it's in our blood, something we always knew and could be glad of knowing, and that it takes no special talent to make up stories from inherited language and lore, whether in novels or in poems. He said nothing, only looked away as if pondering whether to turn me in to the authorities or not.

Confusing poems with confession, of mistaking poetic fictions for autobiography, is a fact of life that astounds me. It has happened before, of course, and not to me only. It might seem a high form of compliment—i.e., when what is made up seems so real they believe it happened—except for the disappointed "Oh" which always escapes after I say it didn't.

I don't believe it's the '60s strain of confessional verse that caused the blurring, most people haven't even heard of Lowell or Sexton or Plath, to say nothing of Rosenthal and other critics who applied the term. And it can't be the first person in poems. I've never met anyone who thought Herman Melville really met a guy named Ahab and lived to tell about it. No one I know confuses Clemens with Huck Finn, or believes Hemingway lay wounded in Spain like Robert Jordan; surely, no one scorns Robert Browning as a male-chauvinist Duke who abused his last Duchess.

But some don't think the poems they like are just "made up"; none have ever asked me if such and such really happened without first saying earnestly that it was a fine poem, truly powerful, and that they could see it. They act as if the only poems worth reading are poems that are "true," deeds I endured and simply recorded—words that tell it the way it was, no merely made-up fantasies allowed.

They're moved by words—no, by the images words call up—and the better they are, the more moving. But when they see the person who wrote them, they transfer all that emotion to a here-and-now hero, a "poet" who turns out to be like them, only a man, after all. I still believe it's worth it when I find a poem that makes me love what matters in this world. I think the duty of a writer is to be interesting and clear, and in that sense to build a bridge—but it's a bridge between a poem that feels real and the reader, not between the poet's real life and the reader.

In other words, Chris: yes, all those uncles are mine, every last one of them; and I hope with all my heart that I'm not through inventing them.

C: Why would someone want to cross a bridge to a "poem that feels real" when there are so many bridges in "real life" that have something "really real" on the other side?

W: Yeah, that's a good question. And I don't mean to seem too simplistic in my answer, but it seems to me there's a type of pleasure that I can get when I read a poem that really works for me. I like fiction, and when I read a novel that works for me, it moves me, it shakes me, it delights me, it makes me weep maybe. When I go to a movie...that's not real life. That's a bit of pleasure that I can't get in my backyard. Frankly, a poem is not as much fun as lifting my youngest granddaughter up and spinning her around my head and having her hug my neck. I can't get as much pleasure out of writing a poem or reading a poem by anyone as I can by holding hands with my wife Carol. But there is a pleasure I can get from a poem that makes it worth my energy of trying to reach it.

We've all heard the old complaint about inaccessibility, that poets are writing for themselves, they're not writing for the common person and therefore common people turn away from poetry. I don't deny that poetry is never going to be a mass market medium. The duty of the writer is to try to make the poem so clear and interesting at the same time that the writer's work is a bridge for the reader who wants to get something out of this game called poetry. Instead of turning our backs or maybe cupping our hands and having some little game, I think we writers need to open up those cupped hands and make something available. Anybody can start a poem, it takes a poet to be clear, Miller Williams said years ago.

C: There is a lot of spiritually in your poems. Where does that come from? Would you describe yourself as a "spiritual" person? Let's take a poem, for example, that affected me deeply: "Flying a Perfect Loop." "When the world/opens downward like a grave,/don't worry, the sky won't disappear/forever."

W: I feel like Paul in Romans 7:21-25, completely depending on grace. Few of my 2,100 published poems have appeared in religious journals, although I've done more than a hundred Christian poems, or poems with obvious Christian or Biblical allusions. But almost none could have been the poems they are without the habit of mind, the profession of faith I make daily.

When writing "Flying a Perfect Loop," I was writing simply and only about flying a loop skillfully and without fear. But I remember that when I came to those lines, or when they came to me, I felt that tingle of recognition that these were the words I wanted, an insight and feeling that meant more to me than mere information. I didn't understand consciously why they were right until later—but not as a double entendre in the sense of heaven—if that's what you mean.

C: To what extent is flying the perfect loop a metaphor for writing the perfect poem?

W: Your question shows the best insight about the craft, and implies its own answer. Yes, the craft, the craft. Flying is a matter of life or death; but writing a well-wrought poem yields insights and joy. We've been discussing what poetry does, what a poem is for. A good poem expresses some of the splendor we all need. Frost said a poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom. Yes, I believe that's so. A good poem is more than an exercise. It gives us a sense of wonder. As James Dickey said of Roethke, "When you read him, you realize with a great surge of astonishment and joy that, truly, you are not yet dead." As many have said, we write about what kills us; and we write about what keeps us alive.

C: "Tornado Chasing" is another poem of yours that seems to describe the perils and pleasures of writing. The tornado spotter describes his relationship to people who listen to his reports on the radio. The way you put it is "they listen like prayer / for my eyewitness news."

W: "Tornado Chasing" was only about tornado chasing—or at least that's what the start of the first draft seemed to be. Once I found that voice, that dude out chasing tornadoes, I rode along, trusting (with that happy faith that goes with writing any poem) that somehow whatever we found would be worth the journey.

C: The spotter is following a "force" that he finds both dangerous and irresistible. Is that how it is with writing?

W: Starting this poem, I didn't know I would find that "force" halfway to Plainview, but accepted it gratefully, like all writing, as a gift. Louis Simpson said the aim of poetry "is to make words disappear." I see, I remember thinking, when I saw that last stanza emerge through words on the monitor, developing like film in a darkroom:

They know the force

I follow, the vacuum of black funnels

in flashes. They gasp like me

and breathe the name of God.

When I found that, I felt I didn't need to say another word. The "force" I follow seldom leads me directly to that word, but always, I hope, to the Word. This is the basis for all my work, in poetry or gardening or whatever: "Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord" (Col. 3:23).

C: So writing is a spiritual activity for you? What do you see as the role of the poet in his or her culture? Do you picture yourself as a "poet-priest" in the Emersonian sense? Or are you the "conscience of your race," like Joyce?

W: For me, there's no such thing as "the poet," and therefore I can't presume to know what "the role of the poet in his or her culture" would be. I'm drawn to poets, not to bards or prophets or crusaders. Yes, writing for me is a spiritual activity, but not in a mystical sense; it's of the earth as well, the work I'm blessed and condemned to do. There can be joy in the sweat of a cockpit or in front of a monitor, pecking away at a keyboard.

I'm not a "poet-priest in the Emersonian sense," nor the "conscience of my race," like Joyce. My senior minister is a better priest than I'll ever be, and my wife's conscience kinder and finer than mine.

I'm not a chronicler of a time and place. I'm open to the things of my lifetime, and the areas I know, but I don't set out to chronicle them. The way I write precludes that—a poem at a time, discovering the game of the poem as I go along, or finding whatever I can write. After I had tried writing poems for a few years, some things Frost said in "The Figure a Poem Makes" made a great deal of sense to me—"Like a piece of ice on a hot stove the poem must ride on its own melting." And "It finds its own name as it goes." And "Step by step the wonder of unexpected supply keeps growing." I didn't set out to record a time and place—not in a single poem about West Texas, or Colorado, or Vietnam, or Arkansas or wherever they've been set. I write always with liberty, license, wild abandon to invent the story I'm writing (either fiction or poetry).

C: The third section of Where Skies Are Not Cloudy is called "Faith is a Radical Master." Could you explain that? What other masters are there? Is it worth the risk of being seared, as one poem describes it, to call down fire from heaven?

W: I never set out to write a "religious" poem "Faith Is a Radical Master" began with a few random words and led to that little story, which turns out to be "true" (factual, about real people I know who suffer) the longer I live. The title came last, as it always does for me. Faith in what, you ask. In god the unseen, it takes a radical faith, a "leap of faith" to get there—not logic, not even science. But again, Chris, it's a poem, not a polemical or religious statement of faith. I suppose the ending is a twist of the old saying that we'd better be careful what we pray for, because we might get it. Who knows, the poem probes, all answers?

C: Here's an obligatory question: by what poets have you been most influenced?

W: Tennyson, Robert Browning, T. S. Eliot (I had an awful time crawling out from under his thumb!), James Dickey. Dickey is still my favorite poet.

To those I could add the usual—Shakespeare, Whitman, Frost. Dozens and hundreds since Eliot's days, including the obvious ones like Roethke, James Wright, and Hugo. Dozens of others, but I was a random reader and still am; I'm drawn to individual poems and books more than to names.

C: When you say you had trouble "crawling out from under Eliot's thumb," what do you mean exactly?

W: Studying as an undergraduate, I heard teachers I respected say that T. S. Eliot was the greatest poet in the language. We studied him intensively. I thought, "That's the way you write contemporary poetry." Allusive. So my first several poems depended on that allusive technique. A lot of the poems in my first book, Caliban in Blue, are like that. I didn't know better. I thought that's the way contemporary poems were made. In time I began to realize that there are other ways. It was like a gate being opened.

C: So Eliot's "thumb" was the allusive technique. What about Eliot's vision—particularly the idea of civilization as a wasteland—was there anything in that that you had to deal with, coming out of your Vietnam experience?

W: I hadn't really thought of that. It was Donald Justice who asked me, "Where's Texas in your poetry, Walt?" Before that I'd never really written about West Texas in poems, and when I opened myself up to this region, I never set out to write a "Texas poem." It was just a change of habit of mind, going back to something I grew up with. there was in that material a lot of this waste land experience—not so much because of the physical landscape, but because of my having come back from Vietnam. The two just became a blend—West Texas, Vietnam. I didn't intend it to be that way. So can I say that The Waste Land by Eliot had an influence? I guess it did, though I never thought of it until you asked the question.

C: Rafting the Brazos, Witching on Hardscrabble, The Digs in Escondido Canyon—Nature is typically very austere in your poems. There's something "out there "smashing in the top step" of the cabin stairway.

W: I take that condition as fact; nature is, as Tennyson wrote, "red in tooth and claw." As I read Genesis, after the Fall, the ground was cursed, animals were given to Adam and Eve to eat, and that's when, in my own personal reading, nature became "red in tooth and claw." And it's been that way ever since.

I admire those who face the facts, wherever they are, and cope. Those who overcome the everyday are my heroes as much as the gallant worthy of honor. There is a beauty, though, a splendor almost everywhere, and sometimes even I can find it.

I know that Emerson played around with the notion that if things are bloody it's all part of the whole, part of the good. I think we live in a fallen world. This world is not my home. If someone has a personal philosophy that the world is not evil, that the world is not fallen, I have no quarrel with that person. I wouldn't want to shake that person's faith in whatever sustains her or him.

C: What's your definition of "evil"?

W: I believe that the devil is like a raging lion going around "seeking whom he may devour." The scriptures say that, and I believe it. I have never seen a lion with horns and a forked tail, so I don't think that it's that easy, that literal.

C: Not that easy to recognize.

W: That's right. I feel that we're really in a battle zone. I don't expect it to end until Judgment. I believe in a literal resurrection of the Lord. I can't prove it. I couldn't possibly begin to prove it. I tried when I was in college. But I believe it. And I think that there will be evil until then, when evil will be banished. There's an old saying: "Read the book; there's Good News. At the end, we win." I believe that, too.

C: Are you consciously using your poetry to fight evil?

W: No.

C: Do you think your poetry does, if only incidentally, fight evil?

W: I don't know what the purpose of my poetry is. I enjoy doing it. I don't think poetry will stop wars, I don't think poetry will warn the world. I think that's what the Lord came for, and look what they did to Him. If He couldn't make the world behave, then how can I with a little thing like a poem? So, no, I don't think I'm a crusader, I don't think I'm a reformer. I'm not Jeremiah the prophet. If I could be those things I probably would. I just do the best I can with the poems I write. I'm not writing the Gospel according to Walt. To call me a "Christian poet" in the same sense that John Donne, or George Herbert, or Father Hopkins—

C: Or Dickey?

W: Dickey, I think, is much more a spiritual poet than I've ever heard him admit to.

C: You've talked about various "regions" that you mine for poetic material, and the term is one that is often applied to you. What is your sense of the term "regions" as it applies to your poetry?

W: I think a writer finds at least one region to keep coming back to. It may be a place—Robert Frost's New England, for example, or Eudora Welty's Mississippi; or in the case of some of us, Texas. A poet keeps prowling a certain region until he or she begins to settle it, homestead and live on it, and eventually own it.

We know that if we read forty or fifty poems by a writer we can't avoid the markings, the territorial claims—certain words, images, obsessive strategies, if not subjects—by which we're able to speak of a Frost poem, or a James Dickey poem. When we see these familiar markings, we don't reduce the poem or the poet; but on the contrary, we feel comfortable, invited out to "the pasture" with Frost, or into the blossoms and jewels and horses of the regions of Ohio poet James Wright.

Of course, not every region is one of geography. Some writers take an attitude, or a posture toward all events as their region. By "region" I don't mean simply geography—but regions of the mind, a cluster of images or obsessions which a writer draws on over and over, for poems. When writers accept their regions, they can discover a mother-lode of images.

Some of us seem to quarrel with our regions—with family, maybe, or the place to where we grew up. Sometimes, it seems like the enemy of our hopes and dreams, and we treat it like an "it." If writers think of their geographical regions as traps, then they may be in the fighting stage of development; it may take them a month, a year, half a lifetime to find regions with the generous supply of images which they need.

When writers accept their regions, they plug into their own mother-lode of images. Until they do, they simply miss the obvious—the uniqueness of place, the abundant reservoir of images, details and insights that matter most to them.

I doubt if any of us could ever exhaust the possibilities for poems set in our own little postage stamp of the world, wherever that is. Oh, somebody may be able to do it better; who knows? But no one can ever do it quite the same way.

Every good poem is a metaphor of how it sometimes feels, to someone, to be alive at some time, at some place. I didn't write many poems before I came back from Vietnam, so I may be wrong. But I think that's what poems are.

When Donald Justice asked, "Where's Texas in your poems, Walt?" I didn't know; I had never thought about it. But I started looking around and, sure enough, I began to feel the call of that wild, semi-arid West Texas which I knew better than I knew Iowa, better then Colorado, better than Vietnam.

For years, I had not considered this world to be my home. But when I let down my bucket in a plains region doomed to dry up, I found all sorts of images for poems, even if I could live to write for forty years in that suddenly fabulous desert.

And so, at last, I write about what I know, about what intrigues me—family, and my native region, flying, the Rocky Mountains where we lived for years, and still, sometimes, the war.

Accepting Texas and all of these other regions into my poems has been the best thing for me, as a writer. This way of writing works for me, and so I'll ride it the way I would ride an only, ugly horse—as far as it will take me.

C: You have been a Councillor for the Texas Institute of Letters and were on the Literature Advisory Panel of the Texas Commission on the Arts. Would you care to assess the condition of Texas letters?

W: Back in 1986 I claimed that the state of poetry in Texas was better than ever. I'll gladly update that by saying yes, and even better, now. I simply mean that I'm aware of more good poets in Texas today than ever before. But I don't want to give only a litany of names of Texas poems. That would take pages, and it would certainly omit some, either from oversight or sheer ignorance.

I think this variety of poets in Texas is wonderful. Nothing but good should come of it. I'd be happy if all good poets moved to Texas. Where better than here to have a variety of talents, and image?

Books of poems by Texas writers have been published in recent years by many major and many good small presses, and Texas poets continue to win national honors. Many of the nationally honored poets in Texas are not native Texans, and several native Texas poets who are nationally famous are not now living in the state. And I know of many others writing stunning poems—poets in Austin,, Abilene, Houston, Denton, Dallas—in most regions of the state I can think of. And how many others I'll n ever even get to read!

So what is the state of poetry in Texas? Fantastic, as I see it. More and more good poems keep coming from poets who once where here, and others now living in Texas, and for that, we can be glad.

C: Let's talk about your teaching a little. Walt McDonald's students are consistently among the winners of creative writing students awards.

W: Yes, I'm a lucky man. If you had taught these wonderful women and men I've been around for decades at Tech, you too would have seen the magic where it happens, in their own words. Isn't it amazing how many talented students there are in any school? Obviously, therefore, I'm happy for and proud of them and thankful for the happy accident of being at the right time at the right place, when these young writers came by. Another reason for the awards is obvious: nominating them in the first place. I don't always hear how many or how few student manuscripts were nominated, but never enough.

C: What is the most exciting thing to you about teaching?

W: One of the pleasures I enjoy as a writer-who-teaches is watching students discover with delight some of the best poems they've ever read, or written. That's why I got into this work to begin with. It's also one of the problems: for not all students come into the writing class with a sense of wonder. Some seem to hide their real needs behind masks of almost poised indifference.

In his novel Free Fall, William Golding said, "To communicate is our passion and our despair." And Flaubert said in Madame Bovary, "None of us can ever express the exact measure of his needs or his thoughts or his sorrows; and human speech is like a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to, while we long to make music that will melt the stars."

I believe that everyone—including my students, and including yours—even the ones who don't like "English"—yearns to say something to someone so moving, so musical, that it would melt the stars—or at least the heart of someone special.

I go back to my stacks of short stories and poems in the creative writing classes—knowing I'll put the same red marks, that Ill also find in every batch someone's sudden insight, an unexpectedly right way of saying. We revel in those unexpected moments of delight. We've all seen students make amazing discoveries in words—those glory times which seal our own commitment to other people's lives, through language.

As teachers, we get to discuss the best stories and poems we've ever read. And hundreds of the best people we've ever met let us hang around while they discover them. We match the eyes; we like to see the sudden insights. We get to coach people how to write better than they knew they could. We promise students they'll be able to take three words with them from literature and from writing classes, from other people's writing and their own: Delight in Discovery. As teachers, we got to be there when it happens.

C: Is teaching a drain on creative energy, or is it a stimulus?

W: It's a fierce and continual drain. I don't try to write (to compose new poems) during busy times of a semester, for I owe them all the energy and time I can give. And yes, it's one of the most enriching and delightful ways to work that I know—maybe not a stimulus to my own writing, but a happy other part of my life. I have the best of both worlds: as a writer who teaches writing, I'm lucky that, for a little while, before the golden bowl breaks and the silver cord snaps, I get to hang around words and see what happens—my students' words, and words that spin off my own fingertips.

As a young Air Force pilot, when I applied to teach English at the Air Force Academy, all I wanted to do was hang around some of the best-used language in the world, some of the most moving, exciting words I'd ever heard—and to share them with others. I still have that thrill, but the words that my students and I write are proportionally more exciting now than when I began teaching. Writing, the act itself, is a much greater joy than I ever thought it could be when I was a young instructor.

C: Distill your "advice to a young poet" in a few sentences. Is it summed up in "Saying the Blessing"?

W: I didn't intend it that way, but, yes, I'll take "Saying the Blessing" as advice I wish someone had told me early on.

Advice to young writers in a few sentences? A semester isn't nearly long enough. But here are a few obvious beliefs I wish someone had told me, years ago.

I urge my students to explore their own regions. Walt Whitman wrote, "I hear America singing, the varied carols I hear." Writing a poem is simply taking something you know—something everyone knows—and singing about it in your own way. By "singing" I mean surprising and pleasing combinations of sounds and images and rhythms—language a bit more intense than familiar cliches. Maybe the most we can do is help young writers accept their own regions or heritage. Walt Whitman, again in his poem "I Hear America Singing," wrote, "Each singing what belongs to him or her and to none else."

Writers write. And, as everyone else says, so I say honestly: Read. Read the journals, a wide variety—big and little magazines. Read, and keep on writing. That's how I began learning, without a tutor or a writing class. Some people can do the same with a tutor, or within a class, and learn this faster. Read contemporary poets. Imitate good poems. Workshop the poems of good poets, especially good modern poets. We grew up with dead poets. Respect them, but when you want to start writing, learn from your competition, the "live poets society."

I think the three hardest things for poets to learn are these—those skills that separate the easy rejects from the poems that grab an editor's eye.

One: show, don't tell. All writers that I admire believe Pound's advice about abstractions. Even those of us who have felt the power of the concrete and recognized the fact that abstractions are fluff, compared to a concrete image, let them fly into our poems and stories, at times, like birds into our trees. At least, as Confucius said, we can try to keep them from building nests there. I urge my students, therefore, to reach; don't sit down in living rooms like couch potatoes, comfortable with the easy abstractions of first drafts. "Go in fear of abstractions," Ezra Pound urged us. Abstractions are lazy boys, deadly boring, addictive, disguised as angels of wisdom. They want you to fail. "Easy writing makes hard reading." Plot summaries, generalizations, abstractions—these are our jailers. They hope writing won't delight us, that we won't discover the wonder of exciting images and details. They don't want us to move our readers. Abstractions are our captors, and they work without pay, because they hate poems and stories. They hope we'll lose faith in ourselves, they want us to quit writing and let them sleep.

Resist abstractions, and they will flee from you. Get off your couch and move about; discover how exciting simple words can become. If you work, what you'll find will be worth it. The activity itself will reward you—the doing of it, the muscle tone you earn only by hard work.

Two: The sense of line breaks. Every native knows how to break lines—for you grew up using language. You can hear which words want to cluster together. If you listen to your own line breaks, you can hear and avoid the awkward ones.

Three: Compression—turning prosy lines into rhythms. Poetry is nouns and verbs; adjectives and adverbs usually make poetry limp along. If you're a healthy person, nine times out of ten, crutches slow you down. The best way to get away from prose is to squeeze; delete every unnecessary word and syllable. A poem is as powerful for what it doesn't say, as for what it says. Less is more, within reason. Every word should earn its own way (think of Michelangelo chipping away all the marble which wasn't David). Talk is cheap. Rewriting is over half the fun of writing; it's the thrill of making words jump through hoops.

C: Could we talk about your newest volume, Counting Survivors?

W: The poems were written before the book came together, as with each of my other collections. Much of my work is obviously a roll call—not formal elegies, but in awe and mourning, and that goes for the living as well as the dead. So many of us lose so much before we're gone—Uncle Douglas, for instance, in part two of the book, and Uncle Philip in part three, even Rembrandt.

I identify with each survivor, of course, as we all do, probably, with all we write stories or poems about. Again, though, I never set out to celebrate or mourn for anyone, anymore; the poems come, and I rewrite as hard as I can to make them work.

C: A lot of the scholarship devoted to you so far identifies Walt McDonald as a "Vietnam author" or "American author of the Vietnam War." Do you have any problem with that? Do you think the critics are missing something.

W: Most reviews and articles and book chapters are focused, topic-specific, not intended to be exhaustive. Poems about Vietnam are only one aspect of my work, of course, but I've been treated kindly.

C: Counting Survivors seems remarkably unpolitical for a book that features the Wall on its cover.

W: I had nothing to do about choosing the cover photo or even what kind of design the book would have. Not a day has gone by for me without another surge of gratitude. The production of Counting Survivors is amazing to me, and I couldn't be more pleased. The first time I saw the cover and then held the book in my hand, I said to myself, "Yes, they've caught all I hoped the book would be, and more." I was stunned and humbled by the design of the cover for the poems; I think it is splendid. I can't look at it without wishing the book had never had to be. Miller Williams has a poem ("Let Me Tell You") that closes, "It does not have to be wroth the dying." I feel that, truly, about these poems, the photo of that monument, those good friends and strangers. The cover is richer than I could have imagined, and I'm still deeply touched.

C: What are your plans?: Where does Walter McDonald seem to be headed as a poet?

W: I think of the late William Stafford's line on PBS: "I'd give up everything I've written for a new one, for a new writing experience.... It feels so good to go through a succession of realizations through language, toward....what? It's an adventure, an exploration, rather than crafting a predetermined object."

Someone said that writers are writers only when they are writing, and I believe that, truly. No more summer school for me, looks like; I miss the money, but time is quicksilver. This summer, I've written more at a stretch than I had since '91, and I'm exhausted, but renewed.

In the Rockies for three weeks, I wrote most days before dawn until noon, leaving most of each day free for all else. Wonderful. Every day is a gift. Almost a month wasn't nearly enough, away from telephones. But it snowed three out of four days—fat flakes big as a fist, first at Estes Park where we like to go, then on to 10,050' near Dillon where it snowed every day, then to Montana to see our youngest son and back through burned, bearless Yellowstone and the Grand Tetons.

I have a leave approved for next spring, eight months back to back, counting the summer. As long as health permits, I'll write, glad for whatever comes.

CHRIS ELLERY teaches Poetry Writing and American Literature at Angelo State University. For three years he was co-organizer of the Fort Concho Museum Press Literary Festival. His poems have appeared in Negative Capability, Concho River Review, Sulphur River Review, Cloverdale Review, and many other journals.