Mark Jenkins

Interview with F. Daniel Rzicznek

MJ: Tell me about your childhood. When did you first consider becoming a writer or poet?

My childhood was remarkably stable and quiet. I lived in Indiana until I was about five and then moved to Northeastern Ohio. I had a few friends, but I remember playing alone quite a bit. I never had to try hard to entertain myself. I have two siblings, but the youngest, my brother, is a decade older than me, and my sister a couple years older than him. They were around, and we were close (still are) but it was never like “Hey, let’s go ride bikes and find some trouble.” So I ended up roaming the small patch of woods behind the house, working out ridiculous imaginary scenarios, regular kid stuff, but typically on my own.

Around the age of eight I became obsessed with comic books and superheroes. And as lots of kids probably do, I tried my hand at my own characters and drawings. I knew my drawings were mediocre, but I aspired for a long time to be a comic book artist. I think the process of making handmade comic books was the impetus of my writing life. It’s still the same set of problems I deal with whenever I write poetry: “How do I take this thing in my head and get it on the page while keeping it alive?” I was always a reader, but it had to be something I was genuinely interested in. I suppose I was stubborn in that regard. Now that I think about it, this applied to nearly everything, and still does to a lesser extent. I was easily bored, but if I liked something, you couldn’t get me away from it. God bless my parents for understanding. As far as poetry at that age, I wrote my share of awkward rhyming poems as a kid, but never with the idea of identifying myself as a writer. I remember writing a haiku in the second or third grade about a dog throwing up on my face, and my classmates seemed to respond to it. That’s what stands out. 

I first came to think of myself as a writer during my undergraduate years at Kent State University, though I was initially wary of the term “poet.” I remember thinking: “Can I call myself that? Geez…” Bob King, an early teacher of mine, gave me great advice. He said: “Never call yourself a poet. Let someone else say it and then you’re safe.” So I went with that. I just kept writing my awkward little searching poems until a classmate or someone said: “Hey, you’re a pretty good poet.” “I guess…” was likely my response.

MJ: How does growing up in Northeastern Ohio influence your writing?

Landscape comes to mind, first and foremost. My parents are from Western Pennsylvania and both grew up with a love of nature and animals. My mother was raised on a farm whose residents included everything from your standard sheep and ponies to peacocks and German shepherds. My father has hunted and fished throughout his life, and he did his share of trapping as a young man. They both love being in the woods and we did a lot of fishing, hunting, camping, and hiking as I grew up. As a result I was very interested in things like plants, birds, animals, weather, the changing of the seasons, etc. For a very long time, well into young adulthood, I took it for granted that everybody was as crazy about the natural world as I was. Turns out quite a few people are actually terrified of “nature.” They’ve never been exposed to it for long enough periods of time to feel at home. Besides comic book artist, I wanted for a long time to be a scientist, a naturalist. Turns out I’m not very good with math, which inevitably sunk my scientific aspirations.

I’m taking the roundabout way here, but I think being in the woods and being in nature helped me become an intensely observant human being, which has no doubt helped me a as a poet. Also, the changing of seasons is wonderful in that part of the state. One gets the full wrath, beauty and wonder of all four seasons. I think hunting also played a big role. You can hunt anywhere really, but if you hunt long enough in one particular region, you can’t help but absorb it. I find my poems inevitably setting themselves in these little places, marshes, lakes, fields, that I’ve come to know very well, just from spending time there. So just being alive in those places, in that particular corner of the world, has had a tremendous impact on why and how I write, though not necessarily what. I don’t identify Ohio itself as a prime subject, as say James Wright does to an extent, especially in his early books. Ohio just happens to be the name of the place I’m from, and I’ve absorbed great swaths of that place and landscape into my writing.

MJ: When did you earnestly start to write poetry?

Earnestly? I suppose I really started writing as an undergraduate. My mother randomly bought me a book, Unending Blues by Charles Simic. It was full of weird little surreal lyrics told by a terribly quirky and interesting voice. I liked them so much that I did quite a few imitations. Really, I started writing poetry for my own entertainment and didn’t show it to anyone outside of the basic creative writing classes I was taking at the time. But at the same time I was writing with relative frequency, I was really more interested in imagining myself as a writer than I was in perfecting any aspects of craft. Living the stereotypically destructive all-night lifestyle of a “writer” was initially more appealing than buckling down on a poem for longer than an hour or two.

But then around 2001, something clicked for me. I had several revelations in my personal life, all of which served (almost accidentally) to move poetry closer to my center. The Wick Poetry Program at Kent State University played an enormous role and I feel very lucky to have been at Kent. Lots of readings, from regional poets to international talents, excellent teachers in the Kent creative writing classrooms, and perhaps most importantly for me, a burgeoning (presently flourishing) outreach program. Teaching poetry to third graders as a student representative of the university had a tremendous effect on me. So many people are under the impression that writing for young children is just a game, or that they’ll have trouble “understanding” modern and contemporary poetry. I found that the opposite was true. I would take in poems by Simic, or William Carlos Williams, or Wallace Stevens, and these kids would literally light up. I remember one student wrote a poem from the point of view of a falling snowflake, and ended the poem with the line, “Will you reincarnate or suffer?” The experience was chock full of brilliant moments like these, and the contact high was unbearably heady. I had poetry coming at me and through me and all around me, all the time. This was also a time when I consciously decided to read as much poetry, from all periods and cultures, as I could. Exposing myself to such a wide variety of writers had an immediate effect on my poems, which themselves became more “educated” for lack of a better word. Really, that path of dedicated enthusiasm for the complementary acts of reading and writing is one that I’ve never strayed from. I think a lot of this had to do with the fact that I was very close to graduating. I realized just how much I loved poetry and didn’t want the activity to become a collegiate memory. So I think I did a lot of things to intentionally focus my nonacademic life on poetry, as to preserve the activity for myself. Ironically, this lead me back to academia, in the form of pursuing an MFA.

MJ: How has your experience of writing poetry changed or evolved over time?

The word volcanic comes to mind, but I don’t want to sound dramatic. The easy way out is to say that my experience changes with every poem I write. But I’d assume that every poet feels that way, though perhaps to a lesser or greater extent. I think immersing myself in poetry of all kinds has had a very distinct impact on how and why my poems, or my “experience” of them, as you’ve put it, changes. It’s never as simple as seeing a poem in couplets and then thinking: “well, let’s try that today!” It’s much more under the surface than that. I absorb something from a specific writer and it may pop up in my own work months or years down the line. Or it may never pop up. But I’ve read it and paid attention to it, and it’s swimming around down there in the depths.

As I hinted at a few questions ago, I don’t think there’s been a lot of change in how I write. It’s the same old problems: how does form support content and vice versa, where does the voice want to go and how do I get it there, and in which direction can we push the darkness of the universe this time? That last one is one that I think about quite a lot, maybe too much. This will no doubt come off as romantic, but I truly believe that each poem written is a battle against ignorance and complacency. Not that poems free us of these things. But one thing I believe a successful poem should do is expand our definition of the universe, including the self. That sounds lofty, but I’m not suggesting that one poem can lead to ultimate enlightenment. I’d actually suggest the opposite, that if one poem can provide another microscopic speck of knowledge, awareness, wonder, whatever we want to call it, then it’s mission accomplished. So in terms of experience, my methods and choices as a writer may change, sometimes drastically, but that particular goal hasn’t.

MJ: What do you like most about poetry and writing it?

I most like the feeling after I’ve finished the initial version of a new poem. It’s a kind of glow I can carry around with me for a while. I’d suppose that was my initial attraction to the art form. I like the feeling of doing something in secret, with the door closed, and not showing it to anyone for some time, just keeping it between myself and whatever I’ve created. The feeling before I write a poem is a more complicated one. Sometimes I’m really excited about what I’m going to write and I can just take right off, other times I may have only a title or a vague idea, and a sort of sweet and strange nausea sets in. In the end though, once the second or third draft is complete, there’s almost always elation.

Really, I try and convince myself to enjoy every aspect of being a practicing and publishing poet. Of course acceptance is great. When I found out about my first book a month or so ago, I was ecstatic. However, to stay humble, I’ve tried to learn to enjoy rejection as much as I can. “Rejection is affection,” as you once put it. Otherwise, we go crazy, right? I’ve found that the minute I’m more worried about rejection or acceptance, or whose winning what contest or whose not, my urge to write goes away. I try very hard to keep to myself, keep my mouth shut, and give as much as I can to the poems.

MJ: Who were the writers that caught your attention during your early years of writing?

Charles Simic, Allen Ginsberg, T. S. Eliot, Walt Whitman, and William Blake where all poets I enjoyed early on. Simic because his work landed in my lap, Ginsberg because I was very interested in the culture of America in the 60’s, and you can’t go very far in that direction without running into Ginsberg. I was taught Whitman, Eliot, and Blake in high school and during my first semesters of college. When I began reading more poets on my own, you know, not just what was handed to me, poets such as James Wright, Sylvia Plath, Richard Hugo, William Stafford, William Matthews, Jean Valentine, Larry Levis, Yusef Komunyakaa, and others made huge impressions on me. James Wright is still a writer that I dearly love. I used to imitate his poems, especially those from The Branch Will Not Break, but now I’d say I don’t really write like him at all. I still love his work though. Not too long ago, I read the new volume of his letters and it was damn beautiful. I was and still am primarily interested in modern and contemporary American poets, but quite a few non-English speaking poets have left their marks on me as well, primarily Rainer Marie Rilke, Antonio Machado, Wislawa Szymborska, and Eugenio Montale, among numerous others. I started very early as a sponge and I still am that way. When I hear another poet or lover of poetry praise a poet I haven’t read, I go out and at least buy one of their books. I think that if I could, I would read everything.

MJ: How do they still influence/ inform your writing now? 

James Wright and Larry Levis are two poets among many who I think will always be essential to my work and my life. I can’t say I write much like them anymore, but I still go back to their work. They were both poets who demanded change within their own work, Levis perhaps more so than Wright, but neither was ever static in terms of form or subject, and I feel this is my true task as an artist: to challenge myself. Notice I didn’t say that I think it should be the task of every artist. So many of my favorite artists (like Frank Zappa and Miles Davis, for two quick examples) made it a point to change and mutate and evolve their talents. There have been plenty of great artists who haven’t gone this route. Mark Rothko, for example, found his ideal format and explored within that format for the rest of his life. He didn’t start suddenly painting hyper-realistic landscapes after he finished the Seagram murals. My poems have always been searching for something and probably (well, hopefully) always will be searching for something. If I’m not willing to change my approach and method to get at whatever it is, then why bother? I already know from writing in various forms and from various vantage points that there’s more than one way for me to get at it. So I try to keep my options open all the time.

I feel like I’m getting to the point where my reading doesn’t necessarily influence my writing, not in any immediate way at least. So these past influences are certainly still influences, but I find myself less interested in how and when certain poets have written, and more interested in trying to determine why they’ve written at all. In this sense, every poet I read is an influence. And as mentioned before, I’m still soaking it up bit by bit, trying to read and understand as many different poets as I have time for. I don’t believe in schools. I believe in poets, and if they’re working hard and toiling honestly, then their work has something to teach me, regardless of my taste.

MJ: What poem or collection of poems do you wish you had written? Why?

That’s actually a very difficult question, one that I’m slightly uncomfortable answering because I sincerely want to write my own poems, in a way that poems haven’t been written before. That sounds very lofty, I know, but all poets, major and minor, leave some sort of mark on their work that makes it theirs, whether distinctly or subtly. I think of a book like Elegy by Larry Levis and say “Yes! I wish I had written it!” Those poems are so incredibly graceful and ambitious and sweeping. But then I consider that if the world had presented me with Larry Levis’ childhood, background, reading, etc., I’d still have written the poems very differently. I suppose I like to think of it more along the lines of which poets’ techniques would I like to absorb into my own writing, and I think about that quite a bit. I don’t want to imitate Charles Wright, but I’d love to have the gumption to tackle a project like his trilogy of trilogies. I think it would be fascinating and invigorating to develop a big idea under which my poems could all hang out together. I’m not sure I’m there yet though. I write many poems that are quite different from one another, so I’m looking a lot in the work of other poets for ways to reconcile poems of different voice, form, tone, etc., under the umbrella of a collection or project.

MJ: What does creativity mean to you?

Another tough question. The first word that sprang into my head was “responsibility” and I think it’s a very important word to place alongside “creativity.” I believe that anyone can take a solid idea for a poem and write it and do a reasonable job. But to make the poem come to life and become a very real and vital part of a reader’s experience certainly requires that initial zap of creative juice, but I believe it must be followed up with artistic responsibility. I’ve seen it time and time again in creative writing workshops of all levels. Someone brings in a poem and everyone goes “Oooohhhh!” The poem gets fawned over and rubbed down by the readers, but when pressed, the poet claims to have no idea what the poem is about or why it was written. This is an example of the lack of the responsibility that I’m talking about. A poet needs to be able to explain and/or defend his or her own writing and should know their own writing intimately. This is a difficult thing to do because, I think, so many writers are bred to turn off their egos and be polite, one downside of creative writing in academia. But Richard Hugo had it right when he said that one must have “a streak of arrogance” to write poems. He wasn’t advocating being a mean or snobbish person. He was talking about believing that only you can write your particular poems the best that they can be written, which is where responsibility comes in. Unless I do my best to honor the ideas and impulses behind whatever poem I happen to be working on and to do my best to get them right and to listen carefully to myself, then that initial creative impulse that sparked it all is insubstantial, just a clump of feathers swept past in the breeze. Responsibility gathers those feathers and makes, well, a bird. Let’s not get the idea that this is an easy thing to do, or something that can happen by accident, at least not more than once in a lifetime. It’s something I struggle with every time I sit down and write a poem, and yes, sometimes I fail. Other times that bird is alive and singing and I know that I’ve held up my end of the bargain, and hopefully it gets across to the reader.

MJ: How do you know when a poem is finished?

That can be a long process, depending on the poem. Or it can be almost obscenely fast, depending on the poem. You’ll see what I mean in a minute. Usually, I know when the initial version of one poem is finished when I start the next one. I’m a sprinter when it comes to composition. I write and revise fast and intensely. I have trouble drawing the composition of a poem out over days, though I’ve written a few long poems in sections that way, but really it’s just the same isn’t it? Ten pieces written over ten days that all fall together under the same title. It’s not like working on the same poem and nothing else for weeks or months. I occasionally go back and look at recent work, maybe make a few changes, but I typically get the poem through a handful of drafts in the course of a morning or afternoon and then send it out a day or two later (after I’ve proofed it) to a journal. Everyone tells young writers not to do this, and while I’m not necessarily advocating it, I’ve found it useful. Twenty nine times out of thirty, that poem will boomerang back accompanied by a rejection slip. It takes rejection to really nudge my inner-editor awake. I may look at the poem and say “Of course! I need to change this, this, and this…” not to please the editor who rejected it, but because I’ve gained a bit of distance from the poem and have a different eye to offer it. Or I may say: “Fools! It’s perfect!” Rejection can be a justification in that sense. I think Donald Hall wrote somewhere that a poem should sit in a poet’s drawer for at least a year before being shown to anyone. I’m sure that can work, and obviously if Hall practices what he preaches, it’s worked for him, Poet Laureate and all. I simply take the opposite approach. If the initial “finished” version of the poem sits on my desk for longer than a week, the chances of me revising it or sending it out fall by about seventy five percent. Getting it out into the cold, cruel world is what it takes for me to start considering what to write next. And when it comes back, I’m ready to work on it. So the next degree of “finished” is when I can’t find anything to change before sending it out again. Down the line, if the poem becomes part of a manuscript, I may make further changes, even if it has appeared in a journal. Basically, whenever I’m given a practical excuse for looking critically at my poems, I try to take advantage of it.

MJ: While you mention that you prefer the idea of writing poetry as a solitary, if not a secret act, when you decide to share your poems who do you show them to? In other words, do you have a circle of writers that you exchange poems with and discuss poetry?

I have a very small group of readers that I show poems to, if I show them at all. I have two or three friends who I’ve come to regard as “essential” readers of my work. Hopefully, they’d say the same of me as a reader. When it’s good, there’s minimal ego involved. I’m not sending the poem to them to hear them rave about it, and if they do, then it might secretly piss me off, especially if I think I could’ve done better. Honest opinions can be quite painful, but when expressed in the service of the work, not in service of the reader or writer, then quite a lot can get accomplished. My wife is a poet, and we share poems with one another and discuss poetry on a daily basis, but we rarely “workshop” one another’s work. We go to one another with specific questions when we have them, but mostly we give one another work for the basic pleasure of reading. There’s an amazing feeling that goes along with being handed a freshly written poem.
            So to answer your question about whether or not I have a “circle” of writers that I show work to, the answer is No. I have a very small number of other poets that I give work to on a fairly regular basis, but to say that they’re a circle wouldn’t be quite right. Some of them don’t even know of each other, so it’s not a circle. And it’s never scheduled or coordinated. I send poems when I feel like it and they do the same. It’s not “workshopping,” just writers exchanging work. I suppose I’ve found the people who I think are the most honest with my poems, and otherwise, I keep to myself and stay busy.

MJ: How important is it to your writing to have such a group?

Well, at this particular moment it’s important for my work to have readers, but not a “group” of them. I think the most valuable part of my MFA experience was learning to tune workshop comments out. That sounds bastardly at first, but really, who can a poet trust if not themselves? Being in a workshop for me was about offering the best criticism I could give and expecting the same from my fellow writers. It’s a great, if not exhausting, process, but I realized during my second year that you can’t write a good poem by committee. You can, however, write a lot of “acceptable” ones that way. Understanding why I disagreed with things said about my work really helped me come to understand the choices I was making as I wrote, and that has been invaluable two years later. Good friends still try and get some informal workshop events together, but I have to decline. Even saying this makes me want to question and defy it, but I think my poems are better off with fewer voices commenting on them. I’m sure that makes me sound like some sort of isolationist, but it’s what has worked best for my poems, so to hell with the consequences. I could, however, see my view on that changing down the line.

MJ: In the introduction to your poems on The Boston Review’s website, Larissa Szporluk believes your poems have a life of their own, to the point of claiming “There is a Frankenstein’s monster aspect” to them. Is this a scary or comforting prospect?

It’s very comforting. I never would’ve thought to phrase it quite that way, but it’s the precise effect my poems are going for. I write by stitching things together. I take maybe an idea for a title, a handful of lines, a notion of shape, etc. and I try to include what seems to be working into the poem. Sometimes parts are discarded in favor of new parts I’ve discovered during the writing process. That’s what Dr. Frankenstein was up to. Anyone can stitch a torso and some limbs together. The challenge is how to get the damn thing awake and out destroying villages and such. So yes, I was very comforted by Larissa’s comment. She found me out.

MJ: What do you think makes a poem live apart from a poet? Is that what makes some poems outlive others?

That’s a very difficult question, one that I would assume most poets are trying to subconsciously answer with each poem they write. I think there’s different ways of considering the question as well. If we mean by “living” on the page, the poem being imbued with the lasting vividness of effect the poet intended, then your guess is probably as good as mine. And really, it’s subject to the reader as well. A poem that is very much alive when I read it may not have the same effect on you. It’s a matter of taste and timing, both incredibly subjective. The second sense deals with this notion of “outliving” that you bring up. How and why are certain poems canonized and others ignored? How and why, heaven help us, do certain poems catch the fancy of society at large? Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” is a great example. It’s one of the most “famous” poems of the last hundred years. Maybe the most famous. It is a great poem, beautifully written, but the extent to which it’s been taken advantage of by American educators and advertisers is maddening. In Mountain Interval, the volume from which it comes, there are at least ten or twelve other poems that I think are superior to “The Road Not Taken.” There are many good reasons for Frost’s overall popularity, but in regards to this one poem, I think it’s been misread and misrepresented. I was having a conversation recently with a high school English teacher from Detroit and we both agreed the poem has consistently been read as symbolic of American tenacity and go-it-alone-ness. We also agreed that there are many other readings of the poem that very few people are even interested in considering. So why has “The Road Not Taken” become this iconic monument of a poem? I think it has been presented that way to the public and accepted by the public as such. Have I even answered your question here?

MJ: Who are some poets you have been reading recently? Who are the poets you are currently excited about?

Well, I’ve been reading Frost with great care and patience, working through the Complete Poems one book at a time. It’s been immensely rewarding. Six years ago I was scoffing at Frost. To someone who was all juiced up on Ginsberg and Burroughs, which writer could be more antithetical to the Beat posture than Frost? As my education progressed, both in my master’s program and privately, and I was learning more and more about form, I came to appreciate a number of Frost poems. I decided to read him en masse because I wanted a challenge. I figured it would be a refreshing change from reading mainly non-rhyming contemporary verse, and I was very much right. I’m still getting to know the work, but Frost is capable of intense beauty cut with realism, not mention his work with metaphor. In “A Winter Eden” he describes a woodpecker with the line “A feather-hammer gives a double knock.” I’m still hoping to articulate why this line, beyond its precise music, gives me such joy. So I’m not finished with him yet, but he has already raised the bar a few notches for me as a poet and a reader.
            A far different poet I’ve recently been taken with is Lucie Brock-Broido, The Master Letters in particular. Her use of voice and especially her use of syntax in that book have turned me inside out. She somehow makes suffering and longing beautiful and mystical. It’s like reading a poet who has recently arrived in our present (her future) via a time machine. Her images and phrasing and somehow her conception of human psychology seem to have walked right out of the past and touched us on the shoulder. Her work doesn’t evoke nostalgia, but it has reminded me that despite both our recent advancements and failures, we’re still the same humans who survived the Stone Age. For me this has led to complication, not simplification, as one might presume, of my condition as a human. I read her latest book Trouble in Mind two years ago and didn’t get any of it. I think it was over my head at the time, so I’d better go back to it and give it another shot. She’s quickly become one of those poets who’ll I’ll be watching closely for a long time.
            I’ve been reading healthy portions of James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Brenda Hillman, Charles Olson, just a few names on a very long and diverse list of poets I intend to read. In terms of more contemporary work, I’m eagerly awaiting new books by both Larissa Szporluk and Maurice Manning, both due out this year.

MJ: Is there a particular place where you do most of your creative thinking?

No, not in terms of thinking. I keep a little bit of note paper in my shirt pocket everywhere I go, and if I hear words or think of phrases or even whole lines I jot them down and maybe make them part of larger ideas later on. I find most of my titles this way. I’m open to creative thinking all the time, or at least I strive to be. To be honest, I do the majority of my creative thinking on the page as I’m composing. I have only a few select places where I typically write, my home office and sometimes the kitchen table. I can and sometimes will write on the go, but I try to avoid it.

MJ: Who are some poets that you feel are under read? Over read?

Wow, that’s very hard to answer because there are so many poets that are actually under read, and I’m guilty of under reading them myself. And really, although my outlook isn’t quite as gloomy as others, I think poetry as an art form is under read throughout the country. In terms of poets that I find really important and feel that other poets could appreciate more, Larry Levis springs immediately to mind. He has an established reputation among insiders to the art, but I feel that younger poets may not give him his due or may not even be exposed to his work. This is all hard to say because it’s pure speculation on my part. I’m not really plugged in to what poetry readers at large in this country are or aren’t reading, so it’s a guessing game. I only know what I’m reading. Let’s see…Ted Hughes. There’s a writer who is truly under read. He’s acquired a very unfortunate reputation, especially in the United States, where Sylvia Plath has been put on a pedestal of sorts. I love Plath’s work, especially the later poems. They make me want to jump right out of my skin, but talk about an over read poet. Back to Hughes, this negative reputation has unfortunately lingered over his work even now that he’s dead. I think there comes a time when one must try to disassociate an artist’s biography from his or her body of work. There are all these labels attached to Hughes by various camps that want to demonize him and of course there’s the aura of Plath’s suicide mingled in there as well, but NONE of that has to do with the quality of his poems, which I’m coming to appreciate more and more. He’s a true wordsmith. I think in general that poets’ Collected volumes are under read. It’s so essay to grab an anthology and read a bunch of representative poems by a crowd of poets, but to read all of Frost, Plath, or Hughes or anyone, not just whatever has been included in the Norton Anthology, that’s a worthy challenge and an invaluable experience for a poet at any stage. So in that regard, most poets, even those who have been canonized, are under read.
            So on the flipside, I’d say that general anthologies are over read. I’m not talking about all anthologies, just the big ones that seek to offer little slices of centuries of poetic endeavor. They certainly have their place and use, but I think they’re relied on a bit too heavily in creative writing courses, particularly at the undergraduate level. I’m not saying they shouldn’t be used at that level, I think the problem is that sometimes that’s all that’s used. And while a good anthology can provide a quick and useful glance at a particular writer, style, or period, they inevitably leave things out. I’ve never once been satisfied with an anthology selection for a poet whose whole catalog I’m familiar with. Frost is once again the perfect example for reasons I’ve stated earlier. Why give a student the top five Frost poems according to a famous critic when you can give them the complete Frost and let them discover their own favorites? That’s what’s great about Collected volumes: in your two hands you hold one woman or man’s lifework, and when you read it cover to cover, you unearth gems that you’d otherwise never know about and those poems become personal for you, straight from the poet to your experience, no editor or critic or scholar moderating the transaction.

MJ: In addition to any influential writers, were there any books on writing poetry that you found especially useful/ influential to your writing?

I’m a lover of books about poetry, from the writing of it to the autobiography end. William Stafford’s books in the University of Michigan series were early inspirations, Writing the Australian Crawl and You Must Revise Your Life in particular. He takes a unique stance toward writing that has always engaged me. He promotes a “no pressure” sort of process that ends up providing its own form of pressure. I’ll try and articulate it: Stafford wrote every day of his adult life, sometimes two poems a day. He’s famous for this work ethic. But he never said “Today I have to be great!” He always said “Today I have to be true to myself and my world, for better or for worse.” That’s the kind of pressure he’s talking about, not writing a good poem, but being true to the poem. Many poems fail this way, in the same way that we fail at so many things everyday. But it’s better than not trying. In that sense, one can’t truly fail. That sort of patience of takes practice. I feel like I have to remind myself of it all the time.
            Other than Stafford, the books on poetry and craft that affected me are really the usual suspects, like Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet. These two are probably over read but for good reason in my opinion. The Hugo book is straightforward talk about writing. He makes it very clear up front that his opinions are indeed opinions, and that the reader should feel free to disagree with him. He has a very warm way of taking you off your guard. Rilke does nearly the opposite, expressing what for him are unavoidable and triumphant truths and one can’t but help to be moved to agree that they are, for Rilke, literal truths. I remember realizing this and thinking I had some serious work ahead of me and that I’d better get my shit together.

MJ: You write both poetry and prose poetry and have been quoted in Double Room as being uncomfortable or at least unwilling to make a strong distinction between the two. With that being said, what is the difference between the two in your own poetry? Is there any reason why one poem ends up a prose poem, while another does not?

            I suppose that what I was getting at, however crudely, in that Double Room piece is what I still believe: that the distinction between poetry and prose poetry isn’t worth as much in terms of discussion as most make it out to be. Comparing the two is as useful as comparing a sonnet to a sestina. The discussion of prose poems on there own and why they do what they do and why they’re exciting, is, however, very much worthwhile. That’s uncharted territory, and that’s why Gary McDowell and myself are editing what will hopefully be a comprehensive and celebratory book documenting what prose poets are currently experiencing: a mini-renaissance in terms of genre cross-fertilization. Because of this blending and borrowing between genres, there’s been a lot of howling going on in classrooms about why prose poems aren’t actually poems, but it’s the same howling that was cracking mirrors and curdling innards fifty years ago when free verse became an influential mode. There will always be howling, and that’s good, because without the howling we have nothing to judge our successes by. Sometimes, I think, the more howling the better.
What I was getting at in Double Room was that I’m more concerned with the artistic and aesthetic worth or impact of any given poem, and not the package it comes in. Whoopee, I wrote a sonnet, but what if it sucks? Where does any argument for strict form go from there? An exclusive argument for any particular view of form assumes that form alone justifies the quality of a poem. Anyone who’s picked up a shitty Hallmark card at the grocery store will tell you that that argument is worthless. Your question is a little different though. I know you write prose poems, so don’t think I’m accusing you of “the howling.” There are a lot of differences that go into why I write a prose poem or a free verse poem or, however rarely, a poem in an inherited form. It comes down to how I’m feeling that particular day, but most of all it has a lot to do with what I think the poem wants to be. And it has mostly to do with how the poem wants to sound. The primary characteristic of a prose poem is that its unit of rhythm and conveyance is the sentence, not the line. The prose poem also favors a more narrative mode than, say, a line of tetrameter. So often times when I feel pulled toward a more narrative impulse, I’ll write a prose poem. Only very rarely have I ever successfully taken an entire poem written in verse and snapped it into prose. I try it occasionally and it never works. Sometimes, however, I start a poem and the verse feels off. I may get four or five lines in and realize it’s asking for prose. I stop and start over, beginning once more but in prose.
For quite awhile now I’ve had some difficulty reconciling my prose poems and my regular poems. I’ve always kept them at a distance from one another, in different projects and manuscripts, though I flow freely in terms of composition between the two. I’m intentionally reconciling this through a number of current things I’m working on. One is a three page poem in sections that switches between poetry and prose for no good reason other than that it looks exceptionally cool on the page and the subject matter dictated its own appearance. That one is very close to being finished, damn near perfect. More recently, I’ve started a series of poems from an imagined perspective, kind of my own personal but more demented and animalistic Henry. These poems are in free verse, but a prose poem about the struggle of writing in such a voice is popping up alongside of each of these poems, so they’re paired in a weird way. I’m excited to see where it goes, and if I had to explain the spirit of all poetry, including prose poetry, that’s it: I want to see where it leads to. I want to travel with it.

MJ: Poems and Prose poem issues aside, how do the poems in Neck of the World differ from the poems in your chapbook Cloud Tablets?

If you want me to define the two collections in terms of aesthetic, I politely refuse. The main difference is that the poems in Cloud Tablets were mostly (98%) written before I came to Bowling Green to pursue an MFA. Some of them were written while I was an undergraduate English major in Kent, and many were written during a period of downtime while I lived in rural Geauga County before moving to Bowling Green. Additionally, they’re all prose poems. I had fiddled with the form here and there and decided to get all of them together as a chapbook. I still feel incredibly lucky that the first place I sent it to, the Wick Poetry Center Chapbook Competition, became its home. It was an across-the-board great experience working with Wick as well as the Kent State University Press, and a coming home of sorts considering that I’d been gone from Kent for nearly two years when Cloud Tablets won.

So if Could Tablets is reflective of my time discovering prose poems as a developing poet, then Neck of the World is a record of the time I sent taking my view and practice of writing to the next step during my MFA. There are no prose poems in the book; they focus instead on short, surrealism-charged lyrical free verse poems, all of which were written during my time at BGSU. My head was in a much different space. While writing Cloud Tablets I was often looking to my immediate physical experiences of the world as a basis for the work. I ran with Neck of the World in a quite opposite direction, inventing many of the experiences from imagination alone, or using imagination to distort or invert actual experiences. It was a liberating change, but not without its problems. Using imagined experience alone sounds, I’d imagine, easy to some, but getting my emotions and meanings into the poem became even more of a challenge. “I have this bear sulking around a hillside within my belly” is a lot more challenging for me to explain than “there was in fact a flood in my old hometown two nights ago and some people died.” They’re both equally valid as poetic material, but while Cloud Tablets cast some lines in surreal and interior directions, Neck of the World sought to make its home there, to anchor firmly and deeply in an imagined world that acts as a sort of mirror to the physical one. Divination Machine, a manuscript composed of free verse that I wrote mostly after Neck of the World, tries to meet up somewhere in between Cloud Tablets and Neck, a greater mix of poetic contexts.

A final difference is that Cloud Tablets was accidental and Neck of the World was planned. In other words, Cloud Tablets just sort of fell together. I realized one day that I’d written twenty or so prose poems and decided to put them all together. Neck of the World was a book I set out to write, a challenge I took up. That feels like a crucial factor in retrospect. I wasn’t exactly sure of what it was going to be, but I knew as I composed the poems that I was writing a book. While I love them both, I’m much more defensive of Neck of the World. It feels like a step I took toward artistic maturity, though I’ll leave that to others to judge.

MJ: Could you explain the significance of your book’s title, Neck of the World?

            You mean: why that particular title? Well, I wrote a poem called “Neck of the World” which is itself a sort of companion (though not really a direct relative) of another poem in the book entitled “Neck of the Woods.” I really liked the way the title “Neck of the World” played on the idea of region, the way it presents the whole world as a singular region. I’ll be the first to say that I don’t think globalization is a good thing. I think, however, that thinking of our world (and our interior worlds) as a complete organism is important. We may not want to believe it, but theories about global warming indeed suggest that what happens in one corner of the world affects an opposite corner. That’s sort of where this idea is coming from, but the notion of “world” is also being played with in terms of interior worlds, which the series of black bear poems (if you remember them) takes up. Is the world of the human imagination (more specifically my human imagination) any less valid than the physical world, so called “reality”? The title and the book seek to indulge and engage this question.
            Additionally, I think some of the more environmentally-minded poems in the book connect with the title. Sometimes it feels to me like everything we have, the whole Earth, is hanging by a shoestring. I can quickly become preoccupied with threats of nuclear apocalypse, catastrophic acts of God, etc. It feels that we have our slimy little hands around the neck of our very existence. Poems like “Bait,” “Crested Daughter,” “Human,” and others all deal with what one could call a landscape of finality, a point of utter destruction. So the title works on a variety of levels for me, which of course made it attractive and hopefully reflective of the book’s complexity.

MJ: What was your process in assembling Neck of the World?

Long, drawn out, never-ending… Really, I spent the better part of a year toying with order. I divided the poems I had into something like seven or nine sections, ten quick poems in each, and taped them to different rooms around my apartment. Whenever I had a free moment around the house I looked the order over, moved that poem there, this one here, and took this other one out altogether. Eventually, I whittled it down to three sections and, with the help of my teachers Larissa Szporluk and Amy Newman, I molded three larger sections. Of the poems I put up on the wall, about a fourth were cut from the manuscript. This became the thesis that I turned in for my graduate degree. A few months later, after graduating, I revisited the work and revised quite a few of the poems but did less in terms of actual order. The whole process, from drafting the first poem to making the final (perhaps) line edit (just last week), took about four years. Not all of that time was spent on Neck, but I’ve been plugging away at it from time and in different contexts: as a thesis, as a manuscript, and now as a forthcoming book. I’ll be happy to have it finished and out on the shelves, but I still know that it will never be finished. I could toy with it for the rest of my life, but that would define the concept of “overworking,” wouldn’t it? Sometimes I think Whitman had the write idea: just keep working on the same gigantic project your entire life, adding and subtracting, until you die. Then it’s done.

MJ: Do you feel like the poems in this collection were influenced by any particular
poets? Who?

Maybe middle-period James Wright. Certainly early Larry Levis, especially Wrecking Crew and most of all Larissa Szporluk who I studied with while writing the book. I think reading Larissa’s work really freed me up in terms of giving over to surrealism, walking that edge of meaning and nonsense. She might disagree with me, but I think her work does it much more gracefully than mine. The delicacy and subtlety of her sound play still astonishes me. I’ve taken a lower road, a path through the ancient caveman ur-brain where even grammar and syntax run the risk of becoming unintelligible.

MJ: I know you’ve entered a number of book contests and sent manuscripts to various small presses. How many did it take and how long have you submitting a book  length manuscript before winning the May Swenson Award?

Let’s see, the first time I sent Neck out was in June of 2005. I received the good news from Utah State in February of this year, so that puts it under two years, which is pretty good. I don‘t have a whole lot of disposable income to throw at these contests, and if I remember correctly, the May Swenson Award was the thirteenth place I sent the book. It felt like a long fight to me, but from what other poets have told me, that’s a relatively speedy success. I feel very lucky that the book was picked, and extra lucky considering that it was an open competition, not a first book contest. That’s a real encouraging factor for me. I think first book contests are great opportunities, but I wanted to be able to send more than one manuscript out at a time. Sending to open competitions allowed me to do this without fear of having one manuscript get taken and then pulling a different one from say ten first book competitions. That’s roughly two-hundred dollars or more. Of course that money goes to the good cause of supporting small presses, and of course the problem I describe is one most young poets would be happy to have, but I decided to leave some doors open, you know? Try some unusual routes for getting that first one out there. The May Swenson Award was in fact the last place I was waiting to hear from about Neck of the World. I had said to myself that if it got rejected this last time, then I’d really have to consider whether or not to continue sending it out. Thank god it didn’t come to that!

MJ: What did you do when you were contacted by Utah State Press?

I taught all late afternoon classes in Spring of 2007 and when I arrived home one evening in the 7:30 pm Ohio darkness, there was a message on the answering machine from Michael Spooner, director of the press. It freaked me out because all he said was: “I need to speak with you about your entry for the May Swenson Award.” My first instinct was that I was a finalist, which was exciting. Then I thought: Geez, maybe I won? And then I thought: Geez, maybe I won but disqualified myself somehow, unknowingly identified myself in one of the poems or something and Michael’s calling me to tell me what a terrible person I am. I listened to the message several times, trying to determine from the tone of voice and turns of phrase whether it was good news, bad news, or no news. I was a little antsy all night. Because of the time difference, I had to wait until about 10:30 the next morning to finally get in touch with Michael. I sat on the couch all morning watching the clock. When we connected and Michael told me that I’d won, I was very happy, ecstatic in fact. I had a similar feeling when the call came about Cloud Tablets: an incredibly happy and panicked feeling of not knowing what to do first. I made some phone calls, sent some email, and generally spread the good news around. That was pretty much it. No drunken orgies or any such thing. My wife put the nix on that.