HoboEye Q&A:
Michael Earl Craig, Montana, USA
Read recent poems by Michael Earl Craig >
In the past month or so, Craig and I have corresponded. Here are some excerpts from our exchanges.
McInnis: Let's start with a book we both love. John Berryman's "The Dream Songs." What about that book first seduced you, and how has your relationship with it changed, if at all, over the years?
Craig: I haven’t looked at the Dream Songs in a while. This morning I read the first twenty again, from a book I had as an undergrad. in Missoula, with pencil marks in it. Interesting...
Anyway, I do remember loving the wild energy of these poems, and also finding them very difficult at times. Difficult I guess compared to Bishop or Merwin or Neruda (a few of the poets I know I was reading at this time), and this is probably in part due to Berryman’s layered references to history, politics, literature, and social figures of his day, the bulk of which sailed quietly over my head.
Also contributing to this difficulty were the syntax and the at times antiquated (Elizabethan?) language. Yeah, many of these poems were (and still are) like puzzles to me, but the difficulties always gave way to a very consistent and persuasive tone. I love this comment of Wittgenstein’s, regarding the poems of Georg Trakl: “I do not understand them, but their tone pleases me. It is the tone of true genius.”
The Dream Songs are fun to read aloud. The rhymes, the choppy syntax, the lurching-then-pausing-then-lurching pace, etc. And the tone somehow glues it all together for me. Even if I don’t always ‘get it.’
McInnis: I love that quote from Wittgenstein. It elucidates something at the center of poetry. Trusting your instincts and letting them lead you somewhere. Trusting in that journey. Wallace Stevens put it well, saying the poet "creates the world to which we turn incessantly and without knowing it." What do you think about that?
Craig: Stevens should have stuck to selling life insurance.
Thinking of tone again—Obama’s (during inauguration speech) seemed to strike the right chord even for those who couldn’t (for various reasons) understand a word he said. He probably COULD take our guns away if he just hummed a little as he reached into the crib.
McInnis: Let's stick with Stevens for a moment. I think we share a skepticism about him. And if I hear where you're headed, we should discuss termite versus white elephant art. It's a distinction that originated in independent film, but it's migrated to the lexicon of many independent artists. It makes a lot of sense for poets. Tell me what the distinction means to you.
Craig: WAIT, there’s no skepticism on my part about Stevens. I was joking. I love Stevens. It was just the twelve year old in me typing. It’s like dismissing Mohammad Ali.
White Elephant art vs. Termite art. Manny Farber, painter and film critic, 1962 essay.
But I was first introduced to this--this distinction--by the poet John Ashbery. It’s been a while but I remember reading an essay by him where he touched on this—I think I was still in Missoula, at U of M [University of Montana in Missoula]--and it made such immediate sense to me. It still does today. I don’t know why but I’ve always identified with the termites. When I read Ashbery’s essay I remember feeling a little bit better about how my poems were beginning, where they headed, and how they ended. Many times people in the writing workshops would ask what it was I thought I was trying to address in a poem. They were trying to be helpful no doubt, but I remember having IS THIS A POEM OR NOT discussions with people a lot, and so the termite concept made sense to me and somehow lifted some of the HEAVY DUTIES OF POETRY off my shoulders.
I guess Stevens might look at first glance to be a white elephant man but one could also make a good argument that he had serious termite (an oxymoron?) tendencies. I’ll have to think about that.
McInnis: I love Stevens too, but I question the way he's been appropriated by some poets. He's seldom allowed the playfulness I see in his poems, seldom allowed that essential solitude that selling insurance afforded him. You could have easily pursued academia; what made you pursue a life as a farrier instead?
Craig: I’m not sure pursuing a career in academia would have been any easier than one in horseshoeing. It did seem to me at the time, when I left U. Mass. (the graduate program), that the proberbial horse really should go up front, ahead of the cart. Looking for a job teaching poetry, but having published no books (and only a handful of poems) didn’t seem right to me. Not just because I was told it probably wasn’t an option, but because it really did seem like a stupid idea. I wanted to learn a trade, make a living, have some job security, work outdoors, and eat ham sandwiches out of a plastic lunch box. And yet it all freaked me out because I’d never had a writing life outside of a university setting. I wasn’t sure I could do this, and yet—and this is my point—I wasn’t sure I could create for myself a career in academia either.
Back to Stevens for a second: What do you mean “appropriated by today’s poets”? Stevens is always wearing a sombrero when he appears in my dreams.
McInnis: A sombrero sounds about right for Stevens. You're right, that was a rather imprecise characterization. From my own reading of Stevens' poems and essays, I've always thought of him as an alchemist (perhaps an alchemist donning a sombrero?). I'm always surprised to meet poets who think of him as an elitist bordering on solipsist. He spoke of that "essential gaudiness of poetry," which is a rather seductive notion to me. He's also rather playful and earnest, earnest enough to have written "Insurance and Social Change."
So, I guess my skepticism rises from the way Stevens is sometimes appropriated, and only because I love his work. As Sinclair Lewis said: "Our American professors like their literature clear and cold and pure and very dead." That's to say what drives academics and what drives artists is seldom the same. A natural distortion takes place when art is appropriated by academics.
But that's a digression... I'd rather get back to where your poetry comes from. Where does writing come from in your background? Is your mom a bibliophile? Were books a natural escape? In that most basic sense, what fostered your relationship to books and words?
Craig: No, Mom wasn’t a bibliophile. Neither was Dad. There wasn’t much reading going on in our house, now that I think of it. Or listening to music. Or watching films. I was a lousy student. My older sister was in AP English, as was my younger brother. They had tall stacks of books they needed to read during the summer vacations. I was permitted to ride my skateboard and I sometimes played hacky sack.
It was for some reason during my first year in college that I decided it might be interesting to apply myself. I had a couple great English professors. One was a man named Lyman Leathers. He wore tweed, always, and had a prosthetic leg. I can still picture him, casually grabbing this leg and swinging it up and over his other knee during office hours. I thought Dr. Leathers was cool, obviously. At first I thought I wanted to write essays. Then short stories. And eventually poems. I’m not sure how I landed at poetry.
Wait a minute... I do remember being genuinely puzzled by a very well known fiction writer/teacher spending what seemed to be two-thirds of his class talking about editors, and readers, and “the market.” When I took my first poetry class no one talked about “the market.” Without even discussing it my poetry teachers seemed to be saying “what market?” This has always been one of the most beautiful things about writing poems.
McInnis: You grew up in Ohio? Michigan? How in the world did you end up going to college in Missoula, Montana?
Craig: I grew up in Ohio. Dayton, Ohio. I went to Ohio Wesleyan for 2 years after high school (Dr. Leathers and Co.). Looking back, Ohio Wesleyan was a great school. Their mascot was a “battling Bishop.” A scowling Bishop with robes and tall hat, sort of squatting a bit, with his fists up, looking like he was about to kick some ass. So yeah, it was a good school. But I think it was too close to home and to everything I knew (or thought I knew). Now I look back and I realize I almost know nothing about Ohio. But anyway, I had been skiing some in the West when I was a kid and there was always something magical and foreign to me about it. So I looked for a good English department, was intrigued by the University of Montana in Missoula, and I visited.
It was the fall of 1990. I was traveling alone. I checked into a youth hostel and then headed out on the town. First I went to a brewery in the old train depot and saw a poetry reading. The place was packed, which I remember thinking was odd. Then I crashed a sorority party by explaining to the bouncer that I was “Chrissie’s little brother.” I remember how loud it was in the doorway. I remember hissing (and probably spitting) into the bouncer’s ear, “You know, Chrissie!!” It was at this party, in the basement, that I saw two hamsters in little homemade uniforms racing each other through a plywood maze on the floor. I think it was toward a small pile of Cheez-Its at the end. And later that night—a beautiful ending to my first evening in Montana—I saw a knife fight in Connie’s (bar). It started as an argument at the jukebox. The bouncer broke it up and no one was hurt. And then immediately, almost as a kind of encore, a heavyset woman got up on the pool table and flung her shirt onto the floor (no bra) and danced in a very heartfelt manner to Blondie’s “Heart of Glass.”
All of this is absolutely true. Missoula was a long way from Delware, Ohio. I was sold. I’d be flying out with suitcases in about 4 months.
McInnis: Yep, that would do it. Then again, Missoula seldom disappoints. I had a similar experience during my first trip there. My buddy Hoss and I drove there to visit his brother, and the whole experience left us so wonderfully dazed and hung over, we missed our turn-off and ended up in Butte instead of Great Falls.
Was it during your time in Montana that you fell in love with horses? It’s unrelated to your poetry, but it’s an abiding passion in your life. Where does it come from?
Craig: I didn’t grow up around horses. I worked at guest ranches or for outfitters (guiding packtrips into the mountains, etc.) for six or seven summers during my Missoula and Amherst years. I would work each summer in the mountains with horses and mules until I was sick of it, and then return to school in the fall. By the time spring rolled around I was dying to get away from campus life and I’d pack up, turn over my apartment, and head for the mountains. This is where I was exposed initially to horseshoeing. I say “exposed to” like it’s some kind of virus or something. It’s more like warts, really.
McInnis: I know your love of horses and your poetry are separate; you don't mingle the two. But your love of Montana has given sustenance to both. It seems you found a life and a life's work in Montana. What is it about Montana that called to you, and called you to stay and build a life?
Craig: I think because I was raised in the suburban mid-west I was unprepared for the lack of order and “progress” that much of the rural West seemed to represent. In suburban Ohio all the lawns were manicured, the strip malls all looked the same and offered the same crap, there were rules, signs, and fences everywhere so no one could go and accidentally kill themselves by falling off an unmarked cliff, and, oh yeah, there were no cliffs. And I don’t remember any towns that were just shriveling up and dying.
In the rural West, however, history seemed somehow more ominous because of the abandoned schools, banks, post offices, etc. And ghost towns! It took only half an hour to get out of town and you could begin to see little signs here and there of the run-down and defeated past. Old slumped over barns, fences, and whole towns that had dried up and been left for dead, but NOT swept under the rug and replaced by Baby Gap or AppleBees. The skeletons were just left there and this isn’t how it is in Dayton or in the New England I experienced during graduate school. Now I realize I’d have to take a closer look at RURAL Ohio for a more accurate comparison, but, as I said earlier, I had no experience with rural Ohio. So for me Missoula was great, but part of its greatness was how quickly one could get away from Missoula.
McInnis: So, after attending the University of Montana, you headed east for graduate study at Amherst. Among your teachers there was James Tate. Even though you're not a Tate devotee, per se, it seems you two have a similar sense of humor in your poetry. Would you say that sense of humor represents in person as well? I could see where your poems might be able to share a drink and a laugh with one another, how does that translate person to person?
Craig: Yeah, you’re right, “devotee” kind of makes me wince. So I had to look the word up just to make sure. “1- a zealous follower or enthusiast; 2- an ardent or fanatical adherent of a religion.” And yet I do clearly remember reading my first poem by James Tate and being definitely excited. At that moment yes, you could say I was an “enthusiast.” Here is the poem:
GOODTIME JESUS
Jesus got up one day a little later than usual. He had been dreaming so deep there was nothing left in his head. What was it? A nightmare, dead bodies walking all around him, eyes rolled back, skin falling off. But he wasn’t afraid of that. It was a beautiful day. How ‘bout some coffee? Don’t mind if I do. Take a little ride on my donkey, I love that donkey. Hell, I love everybody.
I remember coming across this poem in an anthology. I hadn’t read anything by him then. I remember being bored with a lot of the contemporary poetry we were reading in class at the time. I memorized this poem and recited it to everyone I ran into that week. It somehow helped erase all the fly-fishing poems I had read that year. It was also around this time that I came across an anthology edited by Mark Strand and Charles Simic called ANOTHER REPUBLIC: 17 EUROPEAN AND SOUTH AMERICAN WRITERS. This anthology was an eye-opener. I don’t know why but I was just immediately drawn to these poets--Yannis Ritsos, Julio Cortazar, Francis Ponge, Miroslav Holub, Henri Michaux, Fernando Pessoa and Jean Follain (to name just a handful of them).
So yes, I loved Tate’s poems, and still do. It’s interesting, though, because it wasn’t his presence at the University of Massachusetts that drew me there for graduate work. It was the poet Dara Wier who encouraged me to look at U. Mass. Dara taught at U. Mass. and was a visiting teacher at the University of Montana at a point when I was really feeling burnt out by the workshop environment. She was great. She and Mark Levine were both visiting teachers near the end of my time in Missoula, and they both helped turn me around. Before their arrival I was getting pretty bored with writing. I was certainly not thinking about going on to graduate school.
But you asked about Jim. Jim is a quiet guy. I felt I learned more from what he didn’t say or do than from what he did. He was an amazing reader. It seemed he could size up a poem immediately upon hearing it, while everyone else was still trying to figure out what to say, and he loved all kinds of poems as long as they were good. Does this make sense? In other words, he could praise a poem in class that I thought was cheesey as hell—say the poem about the fly fisherman who rescues some stranded ducklings from a Wal-Mart parking lot during a hail storm—and by the time he was finished everyone in the class was like yeah, yeah that’s a fucking great stranded-duckling-poem!! People expect Jim to be crazy, I think, and wildly funny, but he’s really very quiet and often pretty serious in class. Neither he nor Dara talked about grants or prizes or “the market” or anything else that was nasty or retarded about Poetry World. I found my 3 years there to be very productive and fostering.
McInnis: Following up on our previous exchange, I want to draw in something from our recent conversation about Surrealism and humor. I pointed out the similarity between your and Tate's senses of humor. You drew out a subtle distinction, concerned that too many consider a poem "surreal" because it includes humor, or that a poem gets dubbed surreal because it's not like Mary Oliver's poems. I think this is spot-on. Can you please expand on this?
Craig: First off, I don’t want to sound too defensive about the Tate comparison. I guess I’ve just heard so many people point to him when attempting to talk about my poems. I think this is partly because of a similar sense of humor or absurdity, and also because I went to U. Mass., as I mentioned earlier.
And it’s true, when I first read GOODTIME JESUS the poem just hit me as a perfect assemblage of words and logic. Everything rang true. I didn’t need to stop and think about it. I didn’t need to “work” toward “getting” the poem, or stop and ask if it even was one. So a good question is, why didn’t I feel that way the first time I read a Mary Oliver poem? Or a Robert Hass poem? It’s as if our world view is present--locked in, say--by the time we’re how old? Four years? Two years? A day old? I don’t know. All I know is I didn’t “study” the “surrealists” in order to become one. I don’t even really know what people mean by “surrealism.”
I think a lot of people say something is surreal or odd when really it’s just very focused. If I talk passionately about a potato chip for forty minutes someone will call this “surreal.” But is it?
When I was in Missoula there were people who’d use the word three times in five minutes. This confused me. I decided to look into it. I went and purchased a book by Anna Balakian called SURREALISM: THE ROAD TO THE ABSOLUTE.
This is a good book to take a look at when trying to understand the roots of French surrealism—surrealism the literary movement. (Whenever I write “movement” I think of toilets.) I remember finishing the book and realizing, if nothing else, that the author had ruined for me the casual use of the word “surrealism.” This is what makes me the jerk that I am today when I hear the word. I can’t help it. How can a Pekingese wearing a University of Mobile sweatshirt in one of my poems be surreal when I’ve seen this dog on several different occasions while walking in the park?
At any rate, I’ve spent the morning re-reading Balakian’s three forwards from the various editions—1959, 1969, and 1986 (all under one cover). In one of the forwards she talks about what many call American surrealism, and she explains why most of it is not “Surrealism” with a capital S (again, toilets...)
The more I read the more I’m confused. And does any of this really matter? I don’t know. I definitely don’t feel like I’m writing “Surrealism,” but maybe I’ve sipped some of the CoolAid.
[flushing sound in distance...
As for humor, I think many people are unaccustomed to humor in poetry. They really struggle with it. Poetry is supposed to be serious. Profound. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because they’re not funny people. Their outlook, their world vision, is a somber one. I’ve actually heard people talk about “humorous poets” vs. “serious poets.”
But now that I’ve said that I can think of many great poets who make me laugh.
I’m going to jump around here like a frog I’m afraid.
My favorite Tate poems aren’t the really wild and funny ones. While I do sense his humor in just about everything he writes, I think it’s his sadness, his sense of pathos, that I really identify with.
There’s nothing wrong with laughing. Even Mary Oliver is hilarious in her first drafts.
Someone recently sent me a link to a Christopher Walken interview (which now I can’t find!) and at one point, near the end, he was responding to the question, “How is it you can be so funny and also such a quintessential villain?” I wish I could find this again and quote him directly. He basically says that humorous and sinister impulses are very closely related. (When he’s talking they show all this great footage of him shooting people and tap dancing and smashing a vase with a cane and so on.) He says that they come from the same place. When we’re laughing we’re really reacting to something terrifying, something deeply rooted and disturbing.
And that’s funny. Right?
Read recent poems by Michael Earl Craig >
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