Out to see America and satisfy his travel bug, W. T. Pfefferle resigned from his position as director of the writing program at Johns Hopkins University and hit the road to interview sixty-two poets about the significance of place in their work. The lively conversations that resulted may surprise with the potential meanings of a seemingly simple concept. This gathering of voices and ideas is illustrated with photo and word portraits from the road and represented with suitable poems.
The poets are James Harms, David Citino, Martha Collins, Linda Gregerson, Richard Tillinghast, Orlando Ricardo Menes, Mark Strand, Karen Volkman, Lisa Samuels, Marvin Bell, Michael Dennis Browne, David Allan Evans, David Romtvedt, Sandra Alcosser, Robert Wrigley, Nance Van Winckel, Christopher Howell, Mark Halperin, Jana Harris, Sam Hamill, Barbara Drake, Floyd Skloot, Ralph Angel, Carol Muske-Dukes, David St. John, Sharon Bryan, Donald Revell, Claudia Keelan, Alberto Rios, Richard Shelton, Jane Miller, William Wenthe, Naomi Shihab Nye, Peter Cooley, Miller Williams, Beth Ann Fennelly, Natasha Trethewey, Denise Duhamel, Campbell McGrath, Terrance Hayes, Alan Shapiro, Nikki Giovanni, Charles Wright, Rita Dove, Henry Taylor, Dave Smith, Nicole Cooley, David Lehman, Lucie Brock-Broido, Michael S. Harper, C. D. Wright, Mark Wunderlich, James Cummins, Frederick Smock, Mark Jarman, Carl Phillips, Scott Cairns, Elizabeth Dodd, Jonathan Holden, Bin Ramke, Kenneth Brewer, and Paisley Rekdal.
Poets on Place
Tales and Interviews from the RoadBy W.T. PfefferleUtah State University Press
Copyright © 2005 Utah State University Press
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-0-87421-597-7Contents
Foreword........................................................................xiiiIntroduction....................................................................xvWherein We Begin Life on the Road...............................................1James Harms - Morgantown, West Virginia.........................................2Landscape as the Latest Diet (Southern California)..............................4David Citino - Columbus, Ohio...................................................6Through a Glass, Darkly.........................................................9Martha Collins - Oberlin, Ohio..................................................10Linda Gregerson - Ann Arbor, Michigan...........................................13Richard Tillinghast - Ann Arbor, Michigan.......................................16Wake Me in South Galway.........................................................19Winnie Cooper...................................................................21Orlando Ricardo Menes - South Bend, Indiana.....................................22Mark Strand - Chicago, Illinois.................................................25A Morning.......................................................................29Karen Volkman - Chicago, Illinois...............................................30Lisa Samuels - Milwaukee, Wisconsin.............................................34Marvin Bell - Iowa City, Iowa...................................................37Port Townsend, Washington, Waterside............................................40Dust, Corn, and Popcorn People..................................................41Michael Dennis Browne - Minneapolis, Minnesota..................................44from At the Cabin...............................................................47David Allan Evans - Brookings, South Dakota.....................................50David Romtvedt - Buffalo, Wyoming...............................................53With Caitlin, Age 8, Building a Qhuinzee for a Winter Night.....................56The West........................................................................58Sandra Alcosser - Lolo, Montana.................................................60Mare Frigoris...................................................................64Robert Wrigley - Moscow, Idaho..................................................66Ordinary Magic..................................................................69Nance Van Winckel - Liberty Lake, Washington....................................70Awaiting the Return Ferry.......................................................73Christopher Howell - Spokane, Washington........................................74Wherein the Author Ruminates on RV Life.........................................76Mark Halperin - Ellensburg, Washington..........................................77Accident........................................................................80Jana Harris - Sultan, Washington................................................81Mr. Elija Welch, First Planting.................................................83Sam Hamill - Port Townsend, Washington..........................................84The Day I Did Winnie Cooper Wrong...............................................87Barbara Drake - Yamhill, Oregon.................................................90from The Man from the Past Visits the Present...................................93Floyd Skloot - Amity, Oregon....................................................94A Warming Trend.................................................................97Suddenly in California..........................................................98Ralph Angel - South Pasadena, California........................................100Carol Muske-Dukes - Los Angeles, California.....................................104Twin Cities.....................................................................107David St. John - Venice, California.............................................109Dijon...........................................................................112Sharon Bryan - San Diego, California............................................114Death Valley....................................................................116Donald Revell & Claudia Keelan - Las Vegas, Nevada..............................118A Parish in the Bronx...........................................................123Alberto Rios - Chandler, Arizona................................................125Richard Shelton - Tucson, Arizona...............................................128Local Knowledge.................................................................131Jane Miller - Tucson, Arizona...................................................132#15 from A Palace of Pearls.....................................................135New Year........................................................................136William Wenthe - Lubbock, Texas.................................................138Alien...........................................................................141Naomi Shihab Nye - San Antonio, Texas...........................................143Pause...........................................................................147Peter Cooley - Jefferson, Louisiana.............................................149Miller Williams - Fayetteville, Arkansas........................................153RV Life 2.......................................................................156Beth Ann Fennelly - Oxford, Mississippi.........................................158from The Kudzu Chronicles.......................................................161Natasha Trethewey - Decatur, Georgia............................................163South...........................................................................166Denise Duhamel - Hollywood, Florida.............................................168Valentines, Hollywood Beach.....................................................171Campbell McGrath - Miami Beach, Florida.........................................173Terrance Hayes - Columbia, South Carolina.......................................176Threshold.......................................................................179Alan Shapiro - Chapel Hill, North Carolina......................................181Bower...........................................................................184Nikki Giovanni - Blacksburg, Virginia...........................................186Charles Wright - Charlottesville, Virginia......................................190High Country Spring.............................................................193Choosing........................................................................194Rita Dove - Charlottesville, Virginia...........................................196The House on Bishop Street......................................................200Henry Taylor - Bethesda, Maryland...............................................201Harvest.........................................................................204Dave Smith - Baltimore, Maryland................................................206Gaines Mill Battlefield.........................................................209Nicole Cooley - Glen Ridge, New Jersey..........................................210Unfinished Sketch: Green Sandbox Winter Sky.....................................213David Lehman - New York, New York...............................................214April 9.........................................................................217The City So Nice They Named It Twice............................................218Lucie Brock-Broido - New York, New York.........................................220Michael S. Harper - Providence, Rhode Island....................................223C. D. Wright - Barrington, Rhode Island.........................................226from The Ozark Odes.............................................................229Mark Wunderlich - Provincetown, Massachusetts...................................232Elevation.......................................................................236James Cummins - Cincinnati, Ohio................................................239Spring Comes to Hamilton Avenue.................................................242Frederick Smock - Louisville, Kentucky..........................................244Heron...........................................................................247Mark Jarman - Nashville, Tennessee..............................................249Nashville Moon..................................................................252Carl Phillips - St. Louis, Missouri.............................................253Driveway........................................................................257Scott Cairns - Columbia, Missouri...............................................258Mud Trail.......................................................................261Elizabeth Dodd - Manhattan, Kansas..............................................262Sonnet, Almost..................................................................265Jonathan Holden - Manhattan, Kansas.............................................266Pigs............................................................................268Bin Ramke - Denver, Colorado....................................................269Kenneth Brewer - Logan, Utah....................................................272Paisley Rekdal - Salt Lake City, Utah...........................................275Ode.............................................................................278Wherein the Author Considers the End............................................282Gas Giant.......................................................................284Index...........................................................................287
Chapter One
Wherein We Begin Life on the Road
We leave our old home in suburban Baltimore behind at 5:30 a.m., making our way west through the dewy morning. We move carefully through the Maryland panhandle, passing working farms, one time waving at a father and son on a tractor coming the wrong way up the interstate's shoulder. We cross into West Virginia, and by 8:00 a.m. the sun is up behind us, diffuse, but lighting our way.
Yesterday we watched several men put our furniture and boxes in a large truck. They left late in the day, headed this direction; and every time I come over a hill, I half expect to see the truck in a ditch somewhere, our couch upside down in a creek.
By 9:30 we're in Morgantown, too early for the interview. We hit Wal-Mart and get a longer water hose and some animal crackers. We pull up at a small park and open all the windows. I drink orange juice and eat a big donut, while my wife looks outside and listens to whatever kind of bird is going to town on the trees there. A woman and a surging black lab go past the front of the motor home, disappearing down a dark wooded trail.
James Harms Morgantown, West Virginia
Jim Harms couldn't be a more amiable fellow. He lets me in the front door of his neat, white bungalow. I step over his sneakers on the front porch, but leave mine on. We sit across a small coffee table from each other, and I see he's a music fan; the Elvis Costello box set gives that away. His laptop rests between us, as if at any moment it might be needed. The warm breeze comes in the open windows, mixing with the downward draft of a single, lazy ceiling fan. Harms wears a T-shirt and shorts, loose white socks. He moves his hands around when he talks, but it's all relaxed. He tells me about his youth in California and his now decade-long stay in West Virginia.
* * *
Are the places in your poetry based in California, or have you been in West Virginia long enough for it to have taken over?
Most of the places in my poems are the places of childhood, the places of dreams. For some reason, California seems to be the most pervasive landscape in my work: it's the default landscape.
So when I sit down, it's less a matter of what's outside the window, as it is the feeling of locating the calm in this wilderness of constancy, the constancy being memory, the past. I grew up in California. And when I remember the California of my youth, it's the foothills I see-that particular type of wild grass, the sage, the chaparral. Now that I haven't lived there in so long, other residue of place is starting to filter in. And it's only been in the last three years that West Virginia has begun to materialize. And I'm excited by that because it's such an amazing state for so many reasons-not just its physical beauty, but its unique history. It's a tragic state in many ways because of the history of exploitation. It was essentially a state owned by people who didn't live here, and that legacy has been difficult to resolve for many native West Virginians.
In many ways the landscape of West Virginia is caught up in the politics and the social conditions of West Virginia. And that's how it's been entering into my poems, very politically. I'm writing a lot about the destruction of landscape, the lack of concern for place, all the time being very conscious of its beauty. So there's a lot of tension in these newer poems.
I've also learned over the years to let the present place, the place where I'm working right now, leak into the poems. If we were talking about issues of time, they'd be anachronistic poems. The past would be contiguous with the present. In my poems, California and wherever I'm sitting at the time sort of meld, sometimes very obviously. There are a lot of disconnects, and instead of trying to massage them out of the poems, I've allowed them to remain in all their disruptive glory. To me, poetry is all about simultaneity of time and place. I'm really wanting and encouraging that kind of disconnect, a disconnection that is ultimately rather healing in that the normal rupturing of space and time that feels real-if rather alarming-to the rational mind is mended in the poem.
My book (Freeways and Aqueducts) is ultimately a book about leaving one place and finding another. So the book is organized to foreground that notion. The first section is called "West," the third section is called "East," and the middle section is a sequence of poems that acts as a reinvention of the myth of Los Angeles. The collection ends up being about physical and emotional movement: here's memory, here's my sense of coming to terms with the past, and here's an attempt to reconcile myself to the new place.
I knew I had to find a way of coming to terms with a new landscape, a way that wasn't naive, that wasn't simply a glorification of that landscape, or a too surface-y consideration of it. And what came to me was the old clich of "Home is where the heart is." Family, ultimately, ended up being my way of coming to rest. To say, my home now is with people within a landscape. My kids were born here in West Virginia. I started my family here. So the third section of this new book is very much about the presence of family taking over any other concern with landscape.
Place ended up being connected to my children, to settling down.
But do you still think of yourself as a California poet?
I certainly still do. It's not something I feel I have to exorcise. Although there is a sense that it's important to feel at home in the world, so if you're always feeling displaced that it could work against other factors. One of my teachers, one of my good friends, David Wojahn, always said that it was the condition of twentieth-century American poets to be in exile. Because most of us teach, we tend to move away. We follow jobs, et cetera. That ends up being something about the way the American poem has evolved. And I think that's right. There is that sense of displacement in American poems. But I feel a lot less anxiety about that displacement now. I really wouldn't want to live in California again. I love California, and my family and most of my good friends are there. And I visit as regularly as I can. But it no longer seems like an ideal. Because it's the landscape of childhood, the landscape of dreams, I'll probably always write about it.
Landscape as the Latest Diet (Southern California)
Instead of butter, the ten a.m. light of June on Little Island, masts blending the mist until it clarifies into nothing.
Instead of salt, the sand beneath Balboa pier, cool even in July, trimmed with wrack and empty cans, the blue haze of spray and breeze between the pilings.
Instead of bread, the violet stains on the sidewalks of South Pasadena, the jacarandas, their small cry tuned to rhyme the sky.
Instead of eggs, the foothills under smog, the sage and scrub oak browned by drought and the tick of ozone in the air.
Instead of meat, the arroyo at sunrise, the gray inside gray of tulle fog and coyote, coyote bouncing down the deer trail, a pigeon in its mouth.
Instead of sugar, the date palms along the dry wash gathering wind in their fronds for the hourly reprimand, an endless hush.
Instead of wine, the smell of oranges and ocean water, the smoke of smudge pots before dawn.
Instead of supper, the song of bells in the harbor, the seals draped over buoys like fat uncles on the furniture.
And everyone at ease in the middle distance, in repose. And the meal, like memory, a cure for nothing but hunger, but forgetting. -James Harms
David Citino Columbus, Ohio
My wife parks the motor home alongside a large metal fence outside the edge of the Ohio State campus. The campus is ungodly large, yet construction continues to flourish everywhere. We pass work trucks, guys getting out with metal lunch pails, helmets, and other gear, and make our way across to a two-story McDonald's. The place is fantastic inside, clean, empty. Nobody there but Janet behind the counter. We give our order and then head over to a corner of the room. This feels like a vacation to us, like it's a school day and we're playing hooky. We laugh while we eat, wonder if-as is planned-our furniture is arriving in Arkansas this morning.
After we eat, my wife heads back to the motor home, and I sling the big equipment bag of cameras and recorders over my shoulder and start stumbling through campus looking for Denney Hall.
When I find the building, I'm a few minutes early so I sit down on a bench. I notice a first-floor office with lights on. Inside I recognize David Citino. He's moving around his office, pulling a book off a shelf, going back to his desk.
He's talking with a colleague when I go inside and knock on his open door, but he waves me in. He has one of those offices every professor wants, full of books, spacious, well lit from inside and out. I've played racquetball in smaller spaces.
* * *
In what way has place impacted your own writing?
Well, first of all, I think it's done so in immeasurable ways. I've always been of the belief that every poem happens somewhere. That there is a place, even in that love lyric or that expression from the heart of despair that doesn't mention Cincinnati, Ohio, or Rome, Italy. That the poet is in a place-his or her head and soul are in places-and that place helps to inform the poet and the poem. Many of my poems are obviously poems in places. They happen in Ohio, or they happen in other places I happen to be, like Italy. And they use the lay of the land. They are very obviously somewhere.
But I think of place as internal as well as external. I'm from Cleveland. I'm living in Columbus. The where I'm from is a template. If I'm in Dublin, or Rome, or Florence, I seem to relate to cities by what I know. That city I was born and raised in, Cleveland, was gritty and industrial, wonderfully ethnic. It had its neighborhoods of Slovaks and Slovenes and Italians, and black and white-often with their own newspapers, their own grocery stores, bakeries. Cleveland then was divided east and west by a crooked, viscous river that sometimes caught on fire. That's my city, that internalized place. I tell my students that each of us seems to have some ur-place within-some place we know better than the back of our hand. It might be a neighborhood. It might be those four or five houses where we played as kids. We remember our playmates. We remember what their mothers and dads looked like. We remember the way their houses smelled. It might be a city block. But it's a magical place, and in our writing we go back there, over and over again. You know the joke that you sometimes hear is "Every poet just has one poem. He or she just writes it over and over again." I think that in some real sense, every poet has one place. And he or she is able to go there or to see new places always in terms of that original one.
I know you've lived here all of your life, but do you feel like an Ohio poet?
There's no doubt about that. I've been here for fifty-six years. Ohio poet is what I am. And I'm very proud of it. Having been here so long, I know the place. I know Ohio, the magazines and the poets, in addition to the towns, valleys, lakes, and rivers. The idea of being an Ohio poet might be to some very limiting. "You're an Ohio poet? But what about America, the world?" But I believe that so many poets draw strength from that place, from their roots. Think of Faulkner, who is so popular in Japan. Think of Hemingway and those early Hemingway stories from up in Michigan, still read in Russia. There is something about paying attention to one's specific place that enables us to touch the universal.
You talked earlier about traveling. What happens in your poetry when you travel?
So many writers are energized by dislocation. Especially those that are so ensconced in one place. You think of what exile did for James Joyce. He, in Ulysses, recreates this city that he knew. But he was elsewhere, in other cities in Europe, to do that. I've been electrified by travel. I start writing like a maniac, and I still can work on poems that started twenty to twenty-five years ago somewhere else; but you bring them home, bring them back to your place, and you begin to see them better, see better what you're trying to do and say.
Because of my ethnic background, traveling to Italy is going back to my roots at the same time. So it's someplace that's terribly different and exotic, and yet it's a place that feels familiar, as my name might indicate. My grandparents came from the toe of the Italian boot, Calabria, between Naples and Sicily. They came to America because they were peasants and ended up in Cleveland. They met in Cleveland, even though they'd lived in adjacent villages, adjacent mountain tops, really, in Calabria. He worked on the B&O railroad for fifty-four years. I grew up listening to them, my other relatives, and their friends, speaking in Calabrese dialect in a Cleveland accent.
That's another thing. We carry inside us this magical place I've been talking about. But what about the places of our parents, and their parents, even the places of our children? We can't be in only one place. In the old days in Cleveland, you lived on the same street, in the same house, and all your relatives lived around you. But even then you had other places. I often think about one of my father's places. A young man just out of high school gets sent to Guadalcanal. It's a world war. And we have all the photographs of him. He was a second lieutenant. With his men, tents, palm trees, rifles, and, of course, fighting. What a dislocation that must have been. But he was still Cleveland Giovanni, Cleveland Johnny, who just happened to be in the Solomon Islands, fighting the Japanese, writing moony letters back to his wife in Cleveland. I feel that I can appropriate some of his place because blood gives me that right.
Do some places, just by their singular qualities, ever force their way into your work? I taught once at Marion Correctional Institution here in Ohio. In the first two quarters I taught Remedial Writing I and Remedial Writing II. I didn't think much about it at first. I thought the students-their place-would be so foreign to me that I'd just be this kind of separate entity, not touched by the place, and leaving each day to go back where I belong. But I was amazed to find out that I had a lot in common with my students, as I always do. They were Ohioans, after all. Some were from my own neighborhood in Cleveland. And we had incredible things in common. They had so much to write about. I was touched by their place very much. In my book The House of Memory is a poem called "Marion Correctional, Basic Writing," that I wrote from that experience. That place became my place. Of course, I was there two hours a day, three days a week, for one year only, whereas some of them were there twenty, thirty years, more. I'd get in there with my briefcase, and I'd be frisked. There was one guard who'd joke, "Got anything in there but poems, Doc?" I was moved by that place. Terribly new, and yet somehow familiar.
Through a Glass, Darkly
-for the students, who put me in my place
I'm all mouth, mustache, cane, grandiose Italian nose. I squeak, speak in tongues, Cleveland, Little Italy.
But for you, these fevered weeks, I'm cuckoo, vireo and finch, redbird, nighthawk, jay-
a squawk, a call at the windows of this stanza called The Writing Room. Poetry, I try to say,
I crow, I swear. Poetry poetry poetry poetry. -David Citino
Martha Collins Oberlin, Ohio
As we move through Ohio, roads are closed everywhere we go. We're detouring through towns we've never heard of. I imagine dreamy shortcuts that will save us, but more than once we turn down another hopeful street only to bump up against the "No Outlet" sign. My wife and I perfect a thumb movement, a jerking toward the back that says, "Back it up." We use it for a laugh even when we're on a straightaway.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poets on Placeby W.T. Pfefferle Copyright © 2005 by Utah State University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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