the Prairie Schooner blog

Of the wild mind

Interview with Michael Hettich, by Marianne Kunkel

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Michael Hettich's most recent book of poems, Like Happiness, was published by Anhinga Press. A new book of poems, The Animals Beyond Us, which contains the work appearing in the winter issue of PS, is forthcoming from New Rivers Press. He lives in Miami and teaches at Miami Dade College.

MK: Part of the charm of your four poems “Widow,” “The Ghost,” “The Mother,” and “Doubles” (PS, Winter 2010) is their reliance on understatement. In “The Ghost,” for example, you segue from one subject to the next using the casual word “Anyway” and you conclude “The Mother” with the sentence, “And that was all.” These add a light, playful quality to intensely serious and sometimes dark poems. How do you go about crafting this balance?

MH: The poems that were published in Prairie Schooner are all part of a manuscript entitled The Animals Beyond Us, which will be published by New Rivers Press [in October, 2011]. All the poems in that book were written as quickly as possible; in fact I set myself the goal of writing 150 poems before I turned back to any one of them to revise. I did this to try to break into a new voice (of sorts) and to try to discover new material. I had just had my most recent book, Like Happiness, accepted for publication and I felt that I'd ended a period in my writing and life and needed to try to find new ways of discovering what I needed to say. So, as I said, I wrote fast and didn't look back. This was liberating and fun—easy—and when I reached 150 poems I found that almost half of them were interesting enough (to me) to warrant revision. But I tried not to revise too much, since I had come to feel that my revision process had become stale, resulting in poems that felt overly familiar in their strategies and content. They weren't wild enough to hold what I was after (without knowing it yet).

Also, in composing those poems (in their first drafts) I set myself a few rules: move quickly, think by association, avoid stanza breaks, and use a loose four-beat line.

I like your sense that the poems rely on understatement, though I wouldn't have used that word. I think of them as avoiding the kinds of transitions we often (or I often) rely on to build the rhetoric of meaning (so called) a poem articulates. Without the connections such transitions impose, the poems seemed able to find their own music, and whatever meanings that music implied, in ways that felt satisfying and true to me. Perhaps this lighter rhetorical scaffolding allows the poems to achieve that sense of understatement.

I also think I allowed these poems to retain a kind of awkwardness (for lack of a better word) I would probably have worked into more conventional music in my earlier work.

Dogs, cats, and birds play central roles in your poem “Widow” and cats reappear in “The Ghost.” What unique quality do animals lend to poetry? What poems about animals do you love and inspire you to include animals in your poems?

This is a hard one to answer. It's an interesting observation, but I can't say I've actually thought about it. Birds have always inhabited my poems, but come to think of it, not that many animals—until now—have done so. And as I said, this new book is called The Animals Beyond Us. The obvious answer would be that animals other than humans seem to be (and are) so much less afflicted with the kind of self-consciousness that keeps us from being truly present in the world. But then again, as Edwin Muir pointed out, without that kind of consciousness we would hardly be in the world at all, or at least not the world as we know it, as humans. So maybe it's just the mystery of their being in the world with us, sharing that world with us and being so strange to us and full of their own wild life (even when they're domesticated). And what is "the wild mind," anyway? Can we find a way to bring it into our poetry? Might poetry itself be a kind of "wild mind" on the page? And I love the way we glimpse a wild creature sometimes—with a fleeting sense of its presence that immediately vanishes into its own world. The effect is like poetry itself, sometimes.

I see from your website that in addition to writing poetry, you write prose and sing. Of musical performance, spoken poetry or prose, or written poetry or prose, do you consider one more powerful than the others or are they powerful in different ways?

I think they are all powerful in their own unique ways—and I think that their power is unique and specific to their form(s). Having said that, my goal as a writer would be to create poems that are able to fully realize their power as artifacts on the page and as spoken (or read) aloud. That is, I want my poems to be scored on the page in such a way that the reader will hear them much the way he/she would if I were to read them aloud. My problem with a good deal of spoken-word poetry is that it feels dead and slack on the page and requires performance. Since I like to ponder, reread, and revel in nuance, this kind of poetry holds less interest for me. It doesn't feel fully realized to me.

I also love collaboration and have worked a lot with musicians (my son in particular) and visual artists. I do believe, though, that the "products" of these cross-genre collaborations are often more interesting for the artists than for the viewer/listener!

You have lived in New York, Colorado, northern Florida, Vermont, and Miami. Must a writer be well-traveled to touch a wide range of readers through his or her creative writing, or can imagination make up for a lack of traveling experience?

I don't at all believe that a writer must be well-travelled to speak to readers. I think it much more important that a writer bring a unique and specific focus of attention to his/her place and situation. In fact, perhaps we all travel too much; perhaps there's not enough deep knowledge of place in our writings—a result of too much travel, too little careful observation/knowledge. As Gary Snyder says, "know the trees." And who does know them, these days? I mean with a depth of understanding. Something that may be a bit interesting in response to that question, though, at least as it relates to my work: I "locate" myself very much as a person from the north—New York and Colorado and New England. That's the landscape I most identify with. But the images and hauntings that enter my poems more often come from the landscapes of northern and southern Florida—perhaps because, even after many years, these landscapes seem unfamiliar and surprising to me.

In your lifetime you  have published 12 books and chapbooks of poetry; congratulations! What projects are you currently working on? 

Thanks for your congratulations. The fact is, I work on writing for a few hours almost every day, so it's sort of a natural accomplishment. As far as projects, as I said my most recent book, Like Happiness, was published last fall, and I've just finished editing my new book with the New Rivers editors. Last summer I started a new manuscript, tentatively entitled Listening to Owls, since I love to do that—since they always seem to be saying something urgent but just beyond our understanding. I started the book just as the oil spill disaster unfolded last spring/summer, so I think the poems are deeply influenced by that grief, though that may not be apparent in their subject matter. My goal at the outset was to write long poems—20 pages in some cases. And some of them are still long, but at least one of them broke apart a month or so ago, into about 15 smaller poems, an odd experience, and I suspect some of the others might do that, too. So that's the poetry book I'm working on right now. I'm also gathering my energy to finally write the book of essays that have been in the back of my mind for years—about poetry, hearing, wilderness, walking, music—a huge jumble of things I want to try to get at. So I'm taking notes, filling a big box with articles and ideas—for something that may well never happen! And, as a smaller project a visual artist and I are getting ready to start a collaboration. Mainly, though, I'm working on the Owls.

The old, weird America

Poet Grace Bauer, who served as guest editor of Prairie Schooner for the “Baby Boomer” issue (Fall 2009), interviews David Wojahn. Wojahn’s Interrogation Palace: New and Selected Poems 1982-2004 was published in the Pitt Poetry Series and named a finalist for the Pulitzer. He is a professor in the English Department of Virginia Commonwealth University.

Grace Bauer: First of all, congratulations on having your poem, “Mix Tape to Be Brought to Her in Rehab,” chosen for this year’s Best American Poetry. I was happy to include it in the “Baby Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner and am happier still that it will be included in the anthology.

The poem addresses a serious, one might say tragic, situation, and the mix tape of songs seems to be a kind of offering – of comfort? Connection? Maybe hope? Perhaps a reminder of shared, and happier, experiences? Can you talk a bit about the genesis of the poem – and the process of composing it?

David Wojahn: Well, rehab facilities and psych wards are pretty cheerless places, and in the 1980s especially I made a lot of visits to people who were staying in them. So the poem recalls some of those excursions, as well as the peculiar culture of that era—hence the Reagan and Miami Vice references. It was a pretty cheerless era, in my experience…

At the end of the poem, when the “you” gives the woman the mix tape, you’re right in thinking it is meant as an offering, a consoling gesture, however inadequate. You have to remember that mix tapes had a home-grown/hand-made quality about them that isn’t replicated in the digital era. Unlike playlists on i-Tunes, you made them in real time; you thought about the sequencing of the list on both the A and the B side of the cassette; you hand-printed the song list; and cassettes were fragile and temperamental things; the acetate  would snarl or break, the case would melt if you left it in a hot car.

And if you played a cassette on a tape deck or on a Walkman, you could always see how the acetate spooled, getting smaller or larger and circling madly when you fast-forwarded or rewound. Somehow that sense of endless circling became a kind of commentary on the content of the poem and a guide for helping me to structure it. The “you” and the woman of the poem have gone through this hospital routine again and again, it’s a tiresomely circular ritual.

And I also intersperse the narrative structure of the poem with song titles, names of music groups, and song lyrics, and it’s all music I could conceivably have put on a mix-tape in 1980-something. The music references—and it’s a lot of them, Robert Johnson, The Smiths, James Brown, Richard Thompson and a great but forgotten group from the period called the Screaming Blue Messiahs—become a sort of counterpoint to the narrative. But at the same time they act as a skewed sort of chorus: another kind of circularity. My model for this, oddly enough, was Thomas Hardy, who tends in many of his poems to include refrains which are a biting commentary on the poem’s action. So one line of the poem, “the years the years” is there because it echoes a refrain in Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain.”

Mind you, I don’t always think about all this when a poem gets started, but in the revision process it’s something I’m very mindful of.

From the “Buddy Holly” poem in your first book, Ice House Lights, to the “Homage to Blind Willie Johnson” in the “Poltergeists” section of your New and Selected Poems (Interrogation Palace), music and musicians have made regular appearances in your poetry. The list of musicians you’ve “covered,” over the years is an eclectic kind of who’s who. And Mystery Train puts musical icons – and iconic moments in the history of American music -- front and center. Can you talk about your passion for/interest in music and musicians? Are you a musician yourself? What has music given you as a poet? Why do you think you keep returning to that subject matter?

Well, as Lou Reed puts it in a Velvet Underground song, my life’s been saved by rock and roll. It’s been saved by poetry as well. And I say this without hyperbole. Writing poetry is such a pleasure, a consolation, a challenge. And popular music offers me a similar pleasure and consolation. I love rock and roll and subgenres of it such as punk, rockabilly, ’60s soul. And I’m especially drawn to music that for want of better terms gets called roots or Americana: the old ’78s collected in Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, Hank Williams and the Louvin Brothers, delta and urban blues, brooding singer-songwriters like Townes Van Zandt and Jon Dee Graham, and those deliciously feral figures like the late Captain Beefheart and Pere Ubu. They’re the dead and the living representatives of what Greil Marcus calls “the old weird America” and they all just enthrall me.

I reference these artists mainly because I feel someone needs to pay homage to them. And because their songs are always playing in my head, they help to shape the poems I write as well. The title poem of my new collection, World Tree, juxtaposes material that comes from Siberian shamanism and popular music; it’s really a sort of autobiography in the form of dead formats—my 45 years, my 33 & 1/3 years, my cassette era, my digital years. The poem is mainly comprised of sonnets, but the songs that get referenced in it seem as important a structural device as the choice to cast the poem in the form of sonnets.

I wish I were a musician, but aside from playing in teenage garage bands, I’m really just a fan.

Poems about music and musicians are well represented in the “Boomer” issue of Prairie Schooner. Part of that was my choice, of course, but my choices were influenced by the work people sent me – and when I solicited “boomer generation work” – a lot of music-related stuff came pouring in. So, it seems like a fair number of “the best minds of our generation” share your/my fascination with the subject. In her essay on boomer poets included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi suggests that sometimes references to music, and other pop culture phenomenon, are part of what she calls an “iconic nostalgia” and “are merely passwords, the magic argot that opens the doors to a club baby boomers already belong to.” She has a point, yet I might argue that for many poets – you included – exploring the history of popular music becomes an exploration of history itself – a lens to explore the larger culture. Can you talk about how you see that exploration working in your own poems? In the work of other poets?

I thought Barresi made some very astute points in her essay, and it’s true that we sometimes have a kind of Pavlovian response when we hear iconic songs from the Boomer era: we may not immediately salivate and wag our tails when we hear a guy in a labcoat ring a bell, but we do all nod and tap our feet when a Stones song comes on the Muzak while we’re grocery shopping. And since pop music is often designed first to be a commodity and only incidentally to be art, Boomers are fertile ground for crass manipulation by advertisers. But I for one feel positively violated when someone uses an Iggy Pop song as the soundtrack of a car commercial.

But pop music has always reflected the coursings of history. The Childe Ballads were often the newspapers of their time, the latest information about topical stories and scandals. But they’ve somehow alchemized over the centuries into documents that are haunting and timeless. Many of Bob Dylan’s early songs of political protest (some, not all) will surely stand that same test of time. That function—to begin in the topical and end in the timeless—is often the function of poetry as well. Homer is, after all, basically a war correspondent; and Hopkins’ “Wreck of the Deutschland” is, as they say, based on material “ripped from the headlines.”

I don’t think I’m unusual in the ways that I let music inform my poems and their sense of public history. I think of the way poets such as William Matthews, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Michael S. Harper have written on jazz, and of the similar way in which younger poets like Dorothy Barresi, Lucia Perillo, David Rivard, Mark Halliday and especially Kevin Young have  used references to blues and rock and roll. 

Let’s turn from “subject matter” to questions about form and structure. Much of Mystery Train is written in fixed forms – especially the sonnet – a choice some might find odd for a series of poems about rock and roll. Can you talk about that choice?

I wrote the title sequence of Mystery Train (which has 33 sonnets, a villanelle, and a bad sestina) during a year when I lived in Spain. Instead of writing poems about bullfights and going to the Prado, I found myself getting very nostalgic about American culture, and so the poems of the sequence started to emerge. I’d been writing longish narratives and getting tired of that mode, so I resolved to write in a shorter form, and the strictness of the sonnet was especially appealing in that respect. And I thought there was an interesting irony to writing about pop culture in a form as venerable as the sonnet. And the sonnet is just such a delightful, comforting and always-fascinating form to play around with. It’s so flexible, capacious, sly.

Can you talk about poets who have used musical forms/structures in their poems – I’m thinking of blues poems, jazz poetry (written for the page) as well as rap/hip hop and more performance-oriented work.

Well, some performance work doesn’t translate to the written page. Blues lyrics and hip hop lyrics have a better chance of making the leap, since they’re forms that follow some pretty strict prosodic conventions, but there’s not a lot of that material that can stand on its own as poetry. But the blues, jazz, and (increasingly) hip hop definitely have influenced the subject matter and certain of the strategies of modern and contemporary poetry. The blues influence you see early on in poems by Langston Hughes like “The Weary Blues” and “Too Blue” and still see today in poets like Terrance Hayes. And there are countless poets who have written about jazz. Poets who try to write poetry reflecting jazz composition are slightly rarer, but there were some terrific poems of the latter sort written in the fifties and sixties by figures such as Ted Joans and Bob Kaufman. Hip hop’s not my area of expertise, but I recently read a terrific book by the young poet Kyle Dargan called Logorrhea Dementia—it’s about alienation, cultural collapse, and urban madness and hip hop’s the secret soundtrack of that book.

Final – and undoubtedly silly – question : if you could be any musician in history for a day, or night, who would you be? And why?

You mean, besides Bob Dylan?

Another Little Piece of the Future

From from the Fall issue's Guest Editor Grace Bauer:

Like many, I watched some of last week’s Woodstock anniversary specials -- amazed that so much time had passed, amused to see some of the people who had been there (including the perfectly adorable middle aged mom and pop couple who had once been the two disheveled kids wrapped in a ratty quilt on the Woodstock album cover) talk about what it was like, how it had affected them. There are, apparently, many people who were not actually there who claim they were – or actually seem to believe they were. Graham Nash told an interviewer that if everyone who now claims to have been at Woodstock actually had been, he thinks the axis of the earth would have tilted

I definitely wasn’t there – which took me a few years to get over. Still in high school at the time, I (along with a few friends) had actually (miraculously) convinced my parents to allow us to attend a summer rock festival.Not just a concert, mind you, but an entire three day deal. There was a lot of talk on the east coast about two in particular – one in Atlantic City,New Jersey (at the race track) and one in some town nobody had ever heard of way the hell in upstate New York>. Surely, we thought, Atlantic City was going to be where the real action was. So much for being “in the know,” having our fingers on the pulse of freakdom.

Not that the Atlantic City Pop Festival wasn’t great. It took place just two weeks before the concert that went down in history and many of the same bands that played Woodstock were there – Joe Cocker, Jefferson Airplane, Santana, Janis. Alas, no patriotic Hendrix toasting his guitar, no Crosby, Stills and Nash (they were on the bill,but a no-show), though there were the Byrds, Canned Heat, Tracy Nelson and Mother Earth, Dr. John, Frank Zappa (who I was in love with at the time), and Joni Mitchell, who for some reason ran off the stage crying about three songs into her set. And many more. I can’t say I actually recall seeing them all, but as someone once said, anyone who remembers the 60’s too clearly wasn’t really there.

One thing I do recall was seeing Janis Joplin. Not just because she was great and an idol, but because I saw her while sitting on the shoulders of a Hell’s Angel. This was not exactly by choice. Along with my friends, D and P (names withheld to protect the almost innocent), I was working my way to the front of the crowd, determined to be as close to the stage as I could be for this particular act, when suddenly I felt myself being lifted off the ground. I looked down to see it was a huge hulk of a bearded guy in full biker colors doing the lifting, and sensed that this was what has since become commonly referred to as “an offer I couldn’t refuse.” And so I accepted my perch, and the look-her-almost-straight-in-the-eye view of Janis it afforded me, with – dare I say it – grace. I was half convinced I was going to be killed or kidnapped or god-knows-what by nights’ end, but took comfort in the fact that I could die happily, humming “Piece Of My Heart.” Much to my surprise though, after Janis took her bow and left the stage, the hulk proved to be a bit more angelic than hellish. He set me back down on the ground and said “there you go, little lady.” And D and P and I went running off to safety. I’m assuming he was not one of the Hell’s Angels hired to keep the peace at Altamont, the anti-Woodstock concert that happened just a year or so later.

So, you may be asking, what does any of this have to do with Prairie Schooner? Well, it’s the forthcoming Boomer Issue, of course.(Oh, you hadn’t heard? Well, you have now!).In the insightful (incite-full?) overview of “boomer poets” included in the issue, Dorothy Barresi talks about a kind of “iconic nostalgia” she finds in the work of many boomer poets.

Woodstock was certainly iconic. And much of what I saw on the specials aired on TV last week was certainly nostalgic. Many people said they still saw Woodstock as an important, defining event. One young woman, definitely too young to have even been born at the time, proclaimed that she thought it might have been the most important event ever, which makes one wonder if she had perhaps not heard the announcement about avoiding the brown acid that came from center stage in the Woodstock movie.

While I may have been too out of the loop to know that Woodstock was going to be the event of the summer in 1969, I think 2009 is a good time for a boomer issue of Schooner.

Look for it soon. Peace. Love. Dove.