Dan Gerber Interview
Six Questions for Dan Gerber
(interview conducted via e-mail)
Wayne Atherton: Sumac Magazine’s first Editorial Note appeared in issue three, Spring 1969. In a joint statement by you and Jim Harrison, part of it reads, “Some criticism has been directed at us for being what we are not, and we shall remain so. We are not Caterpillar, Io, Kayak, The Sixties, Tri –Quarterly, or Poetry. They are.” In the years prior to publishing your first issue, were there any other poetry-centered periodicals that you may have read and admired which may have served as a possible prototype to expand upon, giving Sumac its own individual imprint or identity? View, The Paris Review, New Directions, and Evergreen Review immediately come to mind as publications worth mentioning and with a history prior to Sumac.
Dan Gerber: I don’t remember Jim and I discussing any other publications as models for Sumac. We just felt that American poetry had fallen into a number of groups, or cliques, and we wanted a journal that was free of those perceptions or divisions. I remember a note from George Hitchcock, that he thought a poem I had sent him was a fine poem, but that it just wasn’t a Kayak poem. We didn’t want to have an idea of a Sumac poem, only that it seemed to us a good poem and a worthy addition to the rather eclectic mix we were putting together.
WA: How was the word spread so quickly in order for you to obtain such a great deal of unsolicited work from such a wide range of poets? This was before the Internet so the word must have been spread via letter writing and phone calls. This fact would set you apart from Semina and The Floating Bear, whose contributors were by invitation/mailing list only and were never sold. Of those other poets whose work you had to actively seek out with direct solicitation, were there any among them who chose not to respond that you wished had contributed something?
DG: We had a very fortunate circumstance in that Jim — in 1968 and just before returning to live in Michigan on a grant he had just received — was working as assistant to Herbert Weisinger, a former professor or ours at Michigan State — who was then head of the English department at The State University of New York at Stony Brook. Jim, along with Louie Simpson, had organized what was called The World Poetry Conference, and it was attended by just about every poet — foreign and domestic — you could imagine. So we were able to talk to a number of poets at the conference, and we had the mailing addresses of almost all of them. My memory is that almost all of the poets we approached responded enthusiastically. If there were any notable exceptions, I don’t remember them. We were also very fortunate that through James Laughlin, with the help of George Quasha, we were offered a new canto by Ezra Pound for our second issue. So, if we needed any additional means of attracting quality work, that certainly helped.
WA: Another co-edited Note from D.G. and J.H. reads, “We’ve had little work from the New York School but then they seem to prefer clubiness.” With the sole example of one Gary Snyder poem, the San Francisco Renaissance poets were virtually absent from Sumac magazine’s nine-volume run. Was that by their design or yours?
DG: There was no design. And certainly no design of exclusion. We wanted to get away from, or around, “The New York School” and “The San Francisco Renaissance,” way of looking at things. And I question the ways in which labels for groups of poets come into being. I remember meeting and spending considerable time with three of the so-called Objectivist poets — George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Basil Bunting, and in our conversations learned how tenuous was the title under which they were grouped. In 1968 Sumac Press did an anthology called Five Blind Men, comprised of the poems by Jim, George Quasha, J. D. Reed, Charles Simic, and me, and in the years and decades that followed I received a number of inquires by graduate students doing studies of “The Five Blind Men School of American Poetry.” What was that, I wondered?
WA: What was the small press distribution situation like back then, 1968 –1971? One of your earliest issues lists 21 bookstores where Sumac could be found. Sumac went four issues before you added a managing editor to the staff. Besides your Sumac Press Books, you began to run several full page ads for books by other presses in your back pages but since Sumac sold for $1.50 to $2.00 per issue back then I cannot imagine a lot of revenue generated there. Do you recall what your subscription base was at its highest peak? Also, James Randall of PYM -Randall Press was your first East Coast Editor. Would you expound upon his role as East Coast Editor for us, what his exact duties may have been? And, who did most of the proofreading? There was a lot of material to proofread in the nine volumes, one issue topping out at around 240 printed pages.
DG: There are about a half dozen questions in the question you ask. The short answer is that $2.00 was a lot more money in 1968. When my first novel came out, in hardcover, in 1973 the price was $5.95. We distributed with a lot of work, contacting bookstores either by mail or by visiting them and making our pitch. I think we had a subscription list approaching 500. Initially I did all the proofreading and I was then an undiagnosed dyslexic. I remember one week, at least, when we received 150 manuscripts for consideration. It was a tremendous amount of work. This led to a managing editor. James Randall had published a broadside of one of Jim’s poems. We would visit him when we were in Cambridge, and he very kindly advised us about establishing a new press.
WA: Your front cover design and images maintain somewhat of a singular and consistent identity with each issue, but with the exception of some etchings by Mary Oppen, all of the inside art pages were black-and-white photo images and a lot of those were taken by you. And, with the exception of Jim Harrison’s “A CHAT WITH A NOVELIST” (Tom McGuane, also to become Sumac’s fiction editor) no interviews with poets appeared. Was that intentional and do you think that if Sumac continued on for several more issues that there would have been more interviews and a more diverse selection of artwork, or was it ever discussed?
DG: I don’t know.
WA: Fast forward to 2105. Are there any current poetry-centered periodicals in print that you would put on the same shelf alongside Sumac ? Not just those in the US but abroad. As an example, in his introduction to The Sumac Reader, Jim Harrison states, “I most loved Botteghe Oscure, edited by Marguerite Caetani out of Rome. Only about one third of each issue was in English which made it attractively mysterious as I had no foreign languages.”
DG: I never thought about comparing Sumac to any other periodicals, either before or after its existence, though there were a number of other magazines Jim and I both admired. Bly’s The Sixties, would be one shining example.
Editor’s Note: all of the poems preceding this interview were contributed by poets who had previously published their earlier work in Sumac (1968 –1971). Some of the poems following the interview are by poets whose work we felt would fit in with the spirit of what Sumac was all about. Other poets were specifically recommended to us by Dan Gerber, Joseph Bednarik of Copper Canyon Press, and Jim Harrison. We would like to thank all three of these gentlemen for their gracious support and assistance in putting together this special Sumac tribute issue.
Gerald Locklin Interview
conducted by Kevin Sweeney
via e-mail, March 2015
Gerald Locklin is a small press legend whom Charles Bukowski once called “one of the great undiscovered talents of our time.” He is the author of more than 150 books, chapbooks, and broadsides and has published over 4,000 poems, stories, articles, reviews, and interviews including his latest collection, Poets and Pleasure Seekers: New and Selected Poems, 2010 –2015 which has just been published by Spout Hill Press. A native Easterner, he went west to obtain his Ph.D. from the University of Arizona and later taught at California State University, Long Beach where he is now Professor Emeritus of English.
KS: You’re originally an Easterner who went West? How has that worked out?
GL: I did my best to become a Californian, but I never became quite that liberated — I’ve always retained a certain reserve inculcated by good working-class parents, aunts, uncles; a good education by the nuns, Jesuits, parish priests, and the doctoral program at the University of Arizona, where the ruling professors were medievalists and old-fashioned, in the best ways, in their values and their treatment of students; what I learned from athletic competition from coaches who were admirable role models up through high school at least; and as part of a circle of friends who could have a lot of fun with little booze and no drugs. I didn’t drink at all until I was twenty, married, on my way to graduate school, and beyond competitive sports. Even after I embarked upon thirty years of drinking during which the good times and bad mostly evened out, my upbringing sustained me, and my athletic foundation helped greatly in quitting booze altogether, cold-turkey, and without twelve-step programs.
KS: Is there a distinctly different perspective in the West, whether on art, life, politics, Mexican food? (I’m thinking of that local Mexican restaurant you once wrote a poem about.)
GL: The worst thing about the East is the snobbery, but even that is limited to certain schools, cities, income levels, “sophisticated lifestyles.” There are plenty of blue-collar, salt-of-the-earth people such as my good friends Dave Newman, Lori Jakiela, and my other literary friends in Pittsburgh; the editors at Slipstream in Niagara Falls and Mike Basinski in Buffalo . . . but you’ll find that in the Middle West and Southwest and Northwest as well. It’s what Edward Field, a New Yorker, discovered via his readings around the country that led to his monumental anthology — A Geography of Poets, from Bantam Books, and his sequel from University of Arkansas Press, The New Geography of Poets.
And yes, there’s still some of the frontier individualism that settlers came West for. And it’s embodied anew in the immigrant and minority communities. But just as American English has homogenized since radio and television and film, so has the mobility of Americans minimized the regional differences. I love Long Beach, but I love Tucson and New Orleans and Texas and Oklahoma and Kansas . . . and Chicago and NYC too, but you won’t find much of my work in the latter, except for the TOAD play, co-authored with my bi-coastal pal, George Carroll, that played for a month of weekends off-off Broadway a few years ago (and in London on the Fringe for a week of evenings a couple of years ago, and in Billings, Montana a year ago). And, ironically, Edward Field has been tragically unappreciated in his two “homes” — New York and London — whereas he is the Father of Us All in Long Beach, even more so, I would say, than Bukowski was.
KS: You taught at Cal State, Long Beach. Some other California poets have been associated with the school such as Joan Jobe Smith, Fred Voss, Marilyn Johnson. Was there ever a Long Beach poetry thing going on?
GL: Yes there was a flourishing Long Beach poetry scene at one time, and you’ve named some of the most prominent figures, and it took its accessibility and gutsiness from writers such as Field and Bukowski and from each other, and it included nearby neighbors such as my close friends Ron Koertge and Ray Zepeda, and Charles Webb, who later joined our faculty at Long Beach State. A scene of younger writers is proliferating right now but I’d want them to speak for themselves. One of them is my son Zach Locklin, and another is Clint Margrave, and an amazingly active and prolific one is Sarah Tatro, and the bookstore, Gatsby’s, is central to it, as is Beyond Baroque in Venice central to all of SoCal writing. Go to these websites and Facebook pages or to my own www.facebook.com/geraldlocklin, and they’ll lead you in the right direction. Oh, Donna Hilbert and her son Andy should be mentioned, and our Sci-Fi genius — Robert Guffey — and our prolific noir author, Tyler Dilts. Long Beach is still a hotbed of adventurous writing.
KS: You’ve written a book on Bukowski whom you knew. Do you get tired of answering Bukowski questions?
GL: Yes. I do. I wish everyone would read my book, Charles Bukowski: A Sure Bet. It’s short and has a great cover by
R. Crumb. You can find it on amazon.com or through its publisher, the rare book dealer, Jeffrey Weinberg, at Water Row Books.
The manager of my FB, by the way, Todd Fox, also maintains an invaluable website for me at www.geraldlocklin.org (dotorg, NOT dotcom). And Mike Basinski produced a scholarly 500-page book of Locklin biblio and scholarly articles by others: Gerald Locklin: A Scholarly Introduction, from BlazeVOX books, also on amazon.com.
KS: You have a Ph.D. in English. What was your dissertation on?
GL: A Critical Study of the Novels of Nathanael West, 1964, Tucson, University of Arizona. It can be purchased at University Microfilms (or whatever it’s called now).
KS: Don’t you defy a certain stereotype about poets with Ph.D.’s who are members of university English departments? You publish in plenty of the smaller, less-funded journals, and you actually have a sense of humor. Don’t they require you to relinquish a sense of humor in order to get tenure?
GL: No, I’ve been treated beautifully by Cal State, Long Beach, never held back for tenure, promotion, and even, in 1997, granted the Outstanding Research and Creative Writing Award by the university. The Library’s Special Collections houses The Locklin Collection, its largest archive, and I’ve been granted access in retirement to my old office, computer, book shelves, etc. That’s where I’m right now. I share it with two former M.F.A. students of mine /now colleagues. I’ve had great department chairs and colleagues, and the chair of our department for the last 15 years, Dr. Eileen Klink, is an administrative genius, a patron of us all, and, simply, a force of nature.
KS: What poets do you like to read?
GL: Webb, Koertge, Billy Collins, my son Zach, and the writers I’ve recommended since 1988 to the editor of The Chiron Review, Michael Hathaway, in my capacity as Poetry Editor, joined now by Wendy Rainey, my son, Zach Locklin, and as fiction editors, John Brantingham, Ray Zepeda, and Sarah Daugherty. But frankly, I’ve always preferred reading fiction and writing it. Poets write for themselves, feeling their egos (and dicks) swell as they emote. Fictionalists tell stories to entertain others.
KS: Is there anything you could tell us about your technique? It seems you have the gift of writing poems that appear to have been easy to write. However, when one tries to write similar poems, one finds it’s not easy at all.
GL: It’s not easy for me to write like myself either, when I try to do it. I don’t write every day — I’m too busy. I write in streaks, fast and furious, with pen on paper, and the worst chore for me is typing the mss. on the computer because I never learned to type and need a lot of help from friends like Todd Fox and Greg Hosilyk (IT director for the College of Liberal Arts) at the computer, where I am a one-fingered, typo-ridden Luddite.
KS: I remember a Richard Hugo poem years ago which he called “a Dear John letter to booze.” Do you have any thoughts about the writing life and the drinking life?
GL: I’ve had a writing life since my Aunt Pat got me started at the age of four. I had a life as a good student, a life as a fanatical athlete, a teaching life, a life of travel, a life of women, a life of children, a life of grandchildren, a life of drinking, a life after drinking, and a life, now, of the culminating years. But I haven’t tossed in any towels. I turned 74 a couple of weeks ago. I hope Kobe Bryant has a memorable final year next season. I hope the Yankees get some pitching. And the writing . . . and readings . . . will, I hope, continue.
KS: I read that Philip Roth had retired and planned to write no more books. I remember learning, back in college, that Hemingway killed himself because he was written out — or some such expression. You’re 74 and still writing; how do you envision your writing future?
GL: I wish that Philip Roth were still writing, because he and John Updike were bookends of their generation for me. My writing future? I never know what I’ll write next. Do you think I envisioned writing these interview answers? I’d pretty much retired from interviews. But your questions opened doors for me. I hope I didn’t slam them on my toes.
No one knows why Hemingway killed himself — or even IF he did. When someone says why Hemingway killed himself — IF HE DID — he’s saying something about himself — perhaps about why he would like to kill himself. Most men — and women — envy Hemingway. They’d sell their souls to write one story as good as his worst one.
KS: I found a couple of your poems in the anthology Literature and Its Writers in a section called “poetry of the chaps and zines?” Don’t most anthologies avoid chaps and zines writers?
GL: The major literary figure, Samuel Charters, who died recently, was responsible for my being in that anthology at all, and also was a force in presenting the work of the Swedish poet /artist (who writes in English), Henry Denander. His wife, the Kerouac scholar, Ann Charters, sent me a copy of his final volume of New and Selected Poems.
KS: Here are 2 exam questions I gave to my Introduction to Literature class about your poems:
How is Gerald Locklin’s poem “Friday Night Lights” a commentary upon American males and their rites of passage?
Why is “So It Goes” a good choice of title for Gerald Locklin’s poem? Is the title — and perhaps the poem too — similar in any way to Bukowski’s “the mockingbird?”
Anything you can share with me in case they dispute my grading?
GL: The title “So It Goes” is lifted from a refrain ending chapters in a Vonnegut novel. Vonnegut’s works suggested at least as many poems, and possibly more, than Buk’s work. But I do think “The Mockingbird” is a much finer poem than, say, “The Bluebird.” The latter poem typifies for me the poems that appeal to readers who don’t really like Bukowski’s at his best, which, for me, is funny and dirty and, in Robinson Jeffers’ sense, “Inhumanistic.” Some readers demand that a writer be soft at heart. The Bukowski that I liked best wasn’t.
As for “Friday Night Lights,” one of the major trends within my life span (1941 – present — sort of ) has been the Emasculation of the American Male. Avenues such as football have to some extent resisted its thrust — the extent of its success, of course, is nonetheless readily apparent in most other areas of American life. Even the current attempts to minimize the number of sports-related concussions may be in hopes of preserving more of the brain for washing.
Wang Ping Interview
Wang Ping A Chinese Immigrant in America Seeks to ‘Create a Wave’ and, Ultimately, a Tsunami
Wang Ping, 47, is the author of several books of fiction, non –fiction, and poetry. Her writing has won the Eugene Kaden Award, the Asian –American Studies Award, and the Minnesota Book Award. Born in Shanghai, she earned her bachelor’s degree in English literature from Beijing University, her master’s degree in English literature from Long Island University, and her doctorate in comparative literature from New York University. The recipient of awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bush Foundation, the New York State Council for the Arts, and the Minnesota State Arts Board, among others, Ping is also a translator, photographer, and teacher. She is a professor of English at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota. The following telephone interview was conducted, in English, by Timothy Gillis on March 13, 2014.
TG: You’ve been in the United States since 1986, when you came to New York to get your master’s degree from Long Island University at age 19. Tell us about those early days in that new setting.
WP: The first year was really hard. I spoke English, but the cultural shock was tremendous. Having only $22 in my pocket didn’t help. People said “UPS” and I said, “I have no idea. What is that?” And the next day, I was working there. So I started working right away and was fired three days later because I didn’t really know anything. I had grown up in the late Cultural Revolution. I was a farmer. Then I went to college. Then I taught. Then I came to the United States. It was basically [during] the Communism regime. Material-wise, I basically had one of everything — one pen, one jacket, one shirt. I did speak some English, but it was a total transformation.
TG: Talk about your literary influences. Who were the writers that moved you toward writing and writing poetry?
WP: I grew up in China, and classic Chinese poetry is in my blood — poets like Li Po, Du Pu. We didn’t really have that much Western culture or poetry because it was forbidden, until I came to the United States. The second year [here], I came to Long Island University and I studied American and English literature. What really impacted me first was the day I walked into the wrong classroom. I thought it was literary criticism, but it was a writing workshop. Lewis Warsh was the professor. [ED. NOTE: Warsh was co-founder with Anne Waldman of Angel Hair magazine and books.] It was pretty funny. When I discovered it was the wrong classroom, it was already too late. One assignment was to write about my first [political] experience. I wrote about the Cultural Revolution. This was what I’d wanted to do all my life.
TG: What was your next poetic step?
WP: Lewis introduced me to Allen Ginsberg, who was organizing the first American-Chinese cultural festival, and he was bringing all these people to New York, and they were going to travel across America to give poetry readings, and Allen Ginsberg needed a translator. Lewis asked me if I was willing to do that and I said, “Of course!” That’s how I started working with Allen Ginsberg, and we traveled all over the country with John Ashberry, Gary Snyder, Bob Creeley. That’s how I became friends with all those people. We became quite close. Pretty soon after that, I met Xue Di in New York. Actually before I met him, Keith Waldrup wrote to me asking me if I would collaborate with him on a translation. And I said yes. After translating all these poets, through this process I started writing poetry. It’s a natural process. After that poetry festival, I started doing more translations which resulted in the book, New Generations: Poems from China Today, a very cool and intimate collaboration with poets like Anne Waldman and Ron Padgett.
TG: I see you have a new work out that’s fiction. And in your previous work, 10,000 Waves, there are poems with dialogues from workers. In the title piece, you take on the voices of 18 of the 21 people who died at Morecambe Bay, England, on February 5, 2004. The Chinese laborers were collecting cockles late in the evening when they were caught by an incoming tide. You did some journalistic research for that, correct? It reads like Spoon River Anthology by Edgar Lee Masters, your own watery epitaphs to the dead. You also tried to give a voice to the three unidentified people who died.
WP: At that time, there were three missing people. It seemed somewhat symbolic to have the chorus in the poem perhaps stand for those missing voices. As I did my research and travel, I heard all the stories, all the voices. From the very beginning, as a writer and a poet, I always questioned myself. After writing about myself and my own position in the world — which is one of your duties as a writer — I ask: Do I only talk about myself or do I have this ability to speak for others? And if I do, what gives me the authority and the right? That’s the true question.
TG: How does one acquire that authority, that right to create a poetic voice for others?
WP: It started with an earlier poem. I was living in New York at the time, hanging out with Ai Wei Wei and others. I wanted to write a poem for this big reading at the Poetry Project. I was scheduled to read with Allen Ginsberg, who was going to read from “Howl.” And I thought, “How can anyone perform with Ginsberg’s “Howl” and not be completely faded?” At that time, the Golden Venture ship was very much on our minds. [ED. NOTE: The Golden Venture was a cargo ship that ran aground at Rockaway Beach in Queens. The ship held 286 undocumented workers, ten of whom drowned trying to flee the stranded ship.] I decided to write a poem about the accident. I researched it.I tried to visit the cemetery in New Jersey. I spent a lot of time learning about what happened. Adrienne Rich later selected it for The Best American Poetry collection. “10,000 Waves” was a continuation of that [type of] poem, and also my interest in answering the questions about whom I write for and what gives me the authenticity. My experience in China and my experience as an immigrant in America allow me to build that bridge.
TG: Tell us about your writing process. Do you typically pursue a topic by researching it, as you did with “10,000 Waves,” or do you let the muse come to you?
WP: I do not have the luxury of not having to work. I’ve always worked, several jobs at the same time. So writing for me is more of a discipline. Every day I must put in some time and energy, either to sit down and write, or think about it — when I walk, or work in the garden, or while cooking. Not while teaching. That takes too much energy. It takes discipline to be ready to write, to remain vulnerable and open, instead of building a wall. In terms of craft, my first two books of poetry were more intuitive. 10,000 Waves is much more conscious. Some of my poems are more narrative because the content requires me to use the story-telling form, and I always try to make sure the music and cadence is there. I believe I have internal music. Music is everywhere. Music is about rhythm, the consonance and dissonance. I’m a dancer — modern dance and the flamenco. I’m a martial artist. I do fencing and yoga. I’m a big mover. I teach full time. I write. I travel. And I sing. I’m a single mother with two children. So how do I do all these things? There are only 24 hours in a day. It’s the rhythm. I’m tapped into my inner rhythm. I synch my internal rhythm with the universal rhythm. So I get rest and am revitalized through doing different things that feed me. I create a wave, and wave after wave creates a tsunami.
Wesley McNair Interview
Interview with Wesley McNair On Personal Poems, Teaching Poetry, and Life as Maine Poet Laureate
The following interview with Wesley McNair was conducted by Timothy Gillis on September 24, 2014. McNair is the author of 20 books, including, My Brother Running, which connects his brother’s fatal heart attack with the explosion of the Challenger shuttle, and The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Family and Poetry, which delves into the personal hardships he endured: his father abandoning the family on a Christmas eve, an abusive stepfather, and the difficulties of raising his own family while finding his poetic voice. In addition to his poetry, he has also edited seven anthologies, three of which celebrate the renaissance in Maine writing in the last 20 years.
McNair’s latest work, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, was inspired by the impending death of his mother. His grief and the need to reconcile with her led him to a series of poems about her homeplace in the Ozarks of southern Missouri. He writes in The Words I Chose that his mother “caused me much pain and suffering in my childhood and youth,” adding that she was nonetheless “an ally in my development as a writer,” who typed up his early poems and stories and saved them all.
The current poet laureate of Maine, McNair is now finishing up the fourth year of his five-year term. In one of his first official acts, he got rid of the term “Poetry Tea” that had been used for the annual poetry celebration at the Blaine House, disliking the elitist image the term conveyed. “It didn’t really match my general goal of bringing poetry to the people,” he says.
McNair lives in Mercer, Maine and has a camp on Drury Pond in Temple, where he creates in his writing cabin, accompanied by his dogs Gus and Rosie, “who crash while I write early in the morning.” After a mid-morning breakfast, McNair swims with the dogs, thinking about the poem he’s been working on. “That’s where the poem gets its second life,” he said. “It comes back into my mind during the rhythm of our swim, and I try to puzzle out where I am in it and where I might go next. The idea is to find a source of anticipation that will carry me into my next writing session. Whether I go in that new direction or not isn’t so important as the feeling of hope I have for the poem.”
McNair has twice been invited by the Library of Congress to read his poetry and has received prizes from Poetry and Poetry Northwest magazines, the Sarah Josepha Hale Medal, a Guggenheim Fellowship, two Rockefeller Fellowships, and two grants in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts. In 2006, he was selected for a $50,000 United States Artist Fellowship.
TG: Tell us about your new work, The Lost Child: Ozark Poems, and where these poems originate.
WM: Let me talk first about the book’s extended middle section, the largest part of the book, in which I describe the people in my mother’s homeplace of the Ozarks. Some of the poems in that section come totally from my imagination, but in many other ones, I blend what really happened with what could have happened and what should have happened, as one tends to do in poetry. To put it another way, I mix real life with the sort of lying that leads to a deeper truth. For instance, I use my mother’s real name, Ruth, in the section, not because everything she does actually took place, but because I catch the contours of her life and attitude and personality. The same approach applies to the Ozark family in the book — that is, they are fictional, but at the same time, they resemble my mother’s actual family and share their story. Her family lived on a hardscrabble farm in the poverty and the hardship of the Dust Bowl period during the Depression. That life was especially hard on the kids, especially the older ones, who worked from dawn to dusk right along with their parents. They were kids who had no chance to be kids — who lost their childhood. As the oldest child, my mother probably had it the worst. Have a look at Ruth in the book’s title poem, who calls herself “the lost child,” and you’ll see just under her comic surface the sadder woman I’m speaking of.
Reprint of, “The Lost Child,” follows the interview.
TG: I found the poems very powerful, and I appreciated the non-fictional bookends of part I and part III — the first part describing your mother’s time in the acute care hospital, and the third part describing her death and the spreading of her ashes in the Ozarks. In part I, “When She Wouldn’t,” Ruth is in her hospital room surrounded by family members, who are trying to talk her into going into a nursing home. Did writing about that real-life event lead you to write the rest of the book?
WM: You’re absolutely right. That poem is crucial to the book because it starts the cycle of grief that inspired all the poems of the middle section. I don’t say in the poem exactly what led my mother to be hospitalized but it had to do with stubbing her big toe. My mother had no circulation in her right leg, so when she stubbed her toe and the wound began to fester, she didn’t feel it happening. Of course, she never told anyone about the problem, either, toughing it out the way she and her siblings learned to do. But eventually she had to be admitted at an acute care center, and by then the infection was life threatening, and we didn’t know if she’d ever come out. That was when the three remaining elderly siblings, the ones in my poem, came from Missouri to be with her.
TG: So the poems of part II came out of your encounter with them?
WM: Exactly. As we talked together about what to do with my mother, what the next step would be, the air was thick with emotion. I bonded with them in a way I didn’t predict. So in the ensuing June, I went to a family reunion in the Ozarks, and when I got back to Maine I began to write poems derived from that visit with my Missouri relatives, in what I see now as an attempt to reach out to my mother. My mother was a difficult person, and I felt the need through these poems to understand her in a different way before she died. When I was maybe two-thirds of the way through the book, she did die. At that point, I wrote also to remember her. So you see the book has a background in grief and reconciliation. Now that the collection is finished, I have to say I’m still a little stunned by it — I think because it took me so deep into the feeling life, which is the heart of poetry.
TG: It’s impressive that you were able to put your feelings into words, especially in the midst of all you must have been going through in this period. The character Harlan Wesley Sykes, “the preacher, who started this clan in Mount Zion” — is that a sly self-reference in the sense that you created these characters by writing this book?
WM: That’s very insightful of you, Tim. As you probably noticed, I refer to myself elsewhere in the book as well. In a couple of poems I write of Ruth’s second or middle son, though I never name that son. And I have to add that I think of myself as a lost child, too. As the two final poems in part III show, I had my own struggles growing up.
TG: In some of the poems in part II, I felt you were not only describing the region of the Ozarks, but America itself. Was this by intention?
WM: As I wrote, I began to think about Colin Woodard’s book, American Nations, which shows how national politics are influenced by regional culture. And I thought especially about the Appalachian migration and its influence. According to Woodard, that migration covered an enormous area of the United States, spreading westward across the top section of the Deep South, through West Virginia and Pennsylvania and Ohio and Indiana and Kentucky and Tennessee all the way to Missouri and Oklahoma and Arkansas and north Texas. So when you’re writing about the Ozarks and the values and attitudes of its people, you’re also writing about the values of a significant part of this country — maybe even about the real America.
TG: What would you say some of these values are?
WM: Anti-government politics, fundamentalist religion, the insistence on a traditional family, the linking of patriotism with the military. The Lost Child includes all of these things, which are both regional and American, even though they might make us Puritan New Englanders wring our hands. It was exciting for me as a New England poet to work with materials like these. Robert Frost once spoke of the freedom of your material, and the freedom I felt was the chance to deal with this other America. But I never really lose my New England self in The Lost Child — what I would call the ironic self. So when I write about that patriarchal figure you mention, John Wesley Sykes, in the poem “The American Flag Cake,” my intentions are ironical. As you know, he’s the one who’s accepted by the Sykeses as their moral guide, the evidence that they’re a chosen people. And yet the contrary evidence of their selfishness and vulgarity is plain for any reader to see.
TG: But you identify with them in some way. In The Lost Child, you seem to create characters that could be held up to criticism or praise in equal measure.
WM: I like that way of seeing it, Tim. On the one hand, I’m discovering myself as a hillbilly, and accepting the people I write about as my people, but on the other hand, as a New Englander, I’m standing back and observing them. Which is why you sense those two impulses you speak of. Working on the poems of the middle section, I sometimes felt that I was embedded in the Ozarks, participating, yet reporting — which explains the ironic edge some of the poems have. But I think that in the end readers of The Lost Child, like you, won’t have trouble finding my sympathy for them — and a sense they have an importance that transcends their limitations.
TG: Many of the poems are not specifically about your mother, but she’s often present, in some way.
WM: True. As you’d expect from a book that was inspired by my grief for her and my need to reconcile with her, my mother is woven all through the book, either through poems that feature her, or poems that include her, or poems that are haunted by the book’s main theme, which is my gradual rediscovery of her as I create the book. So the poem called “Gratitude” shows an older man rediscovering his mother — a stand-in, in his way, for me.
TG: You’ve taught poetry writing for years, and you’ve written a lot of essays about writing poetry. What has your experience shown you about how poets develop?
WM: I’m not exactly the one to ask, because I have an old-fashioned notion about this. My model comes from my relationship with the older poet, Donald Hall, who read my poems and liked them, confirming my choice to become a poet. It’s a model I’d describe as the laying on of hands, one experienced poet welcoming a beginner into this special society. I don’t deny there are other ways of becoming a poet. Poets develop in lots of ways. The prevailing method today is the MFA program, which imitates the older model I’m talking about, the permission to make poems given by the professor who assesses the results in a workshop. That system works, and it has produced some good poets. On the other hand, it is now a full-scale industry that depends on grading and the academy and the banks, and I don’t entirely trust it. Still, that whole issue is moot, because before I retired, I always taught undergraduates, most of whom would never become poets at all. So I was free to pursue a broader mission — that is, to explore poetry as a means of expressing the truth as they knew it.
TG: Could you say more about that exploration and poetry’s truth?
WM: As Hayden Carruth once put it, any American kid who’s reached college age knows that we live in a culture where language is used by the advertisers and the politicians to lie. Poetry, of course, wants nothing to do with that language. At the University of Maine at Farmington, where I did most of my college teaching, in rooms where the furniture didn’t always match, I sometimes felt I was in the catacombs of the culture, and we had gathered together to have a conversation about this new and revolutionary use of words that poetry made possible.