In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Ramsey Mathews
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Ramsey Mathews
Your poem in Volume 24, “Cold Sweet Tea on a Slow Afternoon at the Waffle House” is visceral and poignant due to the terrifying situation you describe. It is written in direct, clear language. What was your reasoning in telling this poem with concise language? Did the content direct the shape of the poem?
In 1998, I was robbed at gunpoint in Sherman Oaks (Los Angeles) California. I eventually published the one page poem “Two Guys with Guns Rob Me.” When someone has a loaded handgun, words seem useless. The world shrinks and becomes quite focused when you’re facing a gun. Nothing outside that space is important.
With the sweet tea poem, I had a similar feeling about being concise.
“Cold Sweet Tea on a Slow Afternoon at the Waffle House” circulated in my head for quite a while after I read it. The specific details make it easy to visualize. At the same time, I found what was unsaid in the piece to be even more telling. I noticed this in both the poem itself as well as the conversation between the two men at the restaurant. Why do you think what is unsaid creates such a powerful message?
My first ever creative writing class was a playwriting elective at Georgia State University. When I see two people talking, I create a backstory and dialogue as if I were part of a theater audience. There can exist great dramatic tension between the lines or through what is not said. I purposely created space for the reader’s imagination to fill in the gaps. The waitress’ confession about cheating sets up the dynamic.
The two guys aren’t enemies. They might talk about relationships, work, families, and life, but too many words would ruin the tension. Once the heat dissipates, I think it’s natural to talk about mundane things, the weather, and sports, to defuse the situation, even with a gun lying in the middle of the table. I left that up to the reader.
The details in this poem are grounded in time and place which makes me think it could be a true story. If you’d care to divulge, is this something you witnessed and if so why did you choose to tell it through poetry?
Yes, this happened. I was working an afternoon shift as the cook trying to figure out how to increase sales. The waitress and I were the only two people in the restaurant. Thank goodness.
All these years, I could never pinpoint the genre for this project. For a long time, I leaned toward writing a one-act play. During the fall of 2021, I read The Complete Poems by Anne Sexton. Something in Anne’s poems inspired me to write this poem and ten others. Sexton became my therapist. Never stop reading.
Nighthawks, by Edward Hopper (1942)
When this event happened, I was nervous, but I never felt in danger. Maybe that was adrenaline or denial. I grew up in rural south Georgia, so I’m familiar with rifles and shotguns. I knew what a 357 Desert Eagle looked like from pictures. A loaded one looks much bigger in real life, especially when the person carrying the gun intends to use it.
I’ve written several ekphrastic poems. Edward Hopper’s iconic Nighthawks painting stuck with me whenever I thought about making this poem. Although my mental camera lens was always inside the building and never outside looking in through those large glass windows. Maybe this is an ekphrastic poem in which I appear.
I still eat at Waffle House monthly. I crave hashbrowns scattered, smothered, and covered along with eggs scrambled with cheese.
In addition to being a poet, you are also a playwright, and a photographer. Do you find that your photography inspires your writing? Do you have any suggestions for people who are interested in developing their own creative outlets?
I’ve published two short stories, a few photographs, and a ten-minute play. I was commissioned to write four screenplays. I write fiction and drama to entertain myself. Photography is a fun escape, like a favorite movie or music video. Photography is also my attempt at fine art.
Most writing programs tell students to focus on one genre. The proverbial ten thousand hours require a lot of time. I believe you should embrace as many creative outlets as you want. Do it for the fun of it. Do it for yourself. Let all your creative outlets nurture you as an artist. Make reading lists. Read craft books. Take a class. Read outside your comfort zone. If you like literary fiction, read sci-fi and vice versa.
If fiction or playwrighting is your second genre, the Pulitzer site lists the winner and two finalists in each category. That’s 30 works of fiction and 30 stage plays from the last ten years. There’s the National Book Awards, Booker Prize, Nobel Prize, Lambda Literary, and Hugo. Many literary websites post staff favorites.
As for screenwriting, during Oscars season, the production companies post downloadable PDFs of scripts for Academy consideration. Many are available all year and for several years. There are lots of craft books on screenwriting. Be sure to use the formatting software when writing.
Study the history and critical theory behind your secondary (and primary) genre. Search the web for MFA and PhD reading lists. Some University websites archive downloadable lists for potential and current students in Gender Studies, Film Theory, African American Lit, Art History, Poetry, Fiction, Drama, Music Theory, Photography, and others. I find that a little dose of critical theory and history primes my creative pump.
Read every anthology you can get your hands on. Don’t forget to write.
I’ve watched hours of YouTube videos about camera equipment and photo editing. I’m sure there’s lots of videos about ceramics, dance, sculpture, guitar, and other art forms.
What projects are you currently working on, or planning for the future?
I’ve submitted a poetry collection to contests every year for the last four years. Each year, I replace old poems with new ones and change the collection title, which currently is What Was The Question. It includes the Waffle House poem. 10 of 20 contests have said no this year.
Earlier this year, I read tons of contemplative essays and poetry by Rumi, Rilke, Basho, Issa, Buson, Thomas Merton, Thomas Keating, Eknath Easwaran, BKS Iyengar, and Mary Oliver. I wrote six new contemplative poems that I like, which I’ll include in the next iteration of my collection. Next time, I’ll forgo the contest route and submit directly to publishers. It’s a lot less expensive. I also have a short story collection. I mentioned that two stories are published. It’s probably time for me to edit the other stories and write a few new ones.
Read widely. Keep writing. Edit. Edit. Edit. Try to have fun.
RAMSEY MATHEWS was born in rural Georgia where he worked in agriculture and played high school football. He wanted to be an astronaut, but calculus fractured that dream. Moving to Los Angeles for film and TV, he did stand-in and stunt work for Patrick Swayze and Ron Perlman, among others. Always a student, Ramsey earned five University degrees: 1) BS in Industrial Management from Georgia Tech, 2) BA in Advanced Composition & Rhetoric from Georgia State University, 3) MA Lit Degree in Modern Drama from Cal State University Northridge, 4) MFA in Poetry from Cal State University, Long Beach, and 5) a PhD in English and Creative Writing from Florida State University with additional focus on African American Poetry and Drama. Ramsey loves black-and-white photography. Follow him on Instagram @ramseymathews and Twitter @dramapoet.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Mona Susan Power
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Mona Susan Power
Your fictional short story in Volume 24, “Iktomi Spins a Web” is a fresh take on Iktómi, a trickster spider from Dakota and Lakota traditions. What was your intention behind creating a new story with a traditional character? Are there certain things a writer should take into consideration when reworking elements of traditional tales?
I honestly don’t choose new writing projects, rather feel as if they choose me. I’ll hear a line in my head or glimpse the flash of an image, and my imagination is off and running! I have to solve the mystery of what the image signifies, or who spoke the line of narration. I not only give myself full permission to follow what comes to me, unbidden, but feel compelled to do so.
When I was invited to write a short piece for a project on bringing life to an article from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, I was drawn to Article 19 which declares the right to personally own property. Raised as I was to see territory as a relative, this concept of ownership is troubling. No sooner did I have that thought than Iktómi appeared in my head, prepared to take on the issue in an extreme and foolish way. In many stories he teaches us important lessons through his poor decisions or rash actions. Once the story was written, I felt it fit within that tradition. Nothing came of the original project, but I was grateful for the gift of a new piece.
At the beginning of your story, I was immediately intrigued by the viewpoint you gave Iktómi. We aren’t told he is a spider, but through description this becomes evident. I loved how you described his life in a human home eating crumbs and avoiding the vacuum cleaner as well as his perspective of the people who watch “Coyote News all day, every day.” What was your process developing this character with such a unique perspective?
As soon as I wrote the first line of the story, I was immersed in Iktómi’s perspective, seeing everything through his (many) eyes. It’s difficult to talk about the story process in terms of conscious development since it’s a story that just flew out of my fingers as I typed. One picture in my head led to another and another. I didn’t purposely withhold the information that he is a spider, but viewing the world from his point of view, there was no need to make mention since we ordinary folks don’t introduce ourselves to one another by stating that we’re human.
What partly inspired this slice of Iktómi’s life in a “foreign” home which is off-reservation, is a visit I had years ago, as the guest of a farm family who lived on the border between North and South Dakota. We had a lovely time together though we were so different culturally and politically.
As is common with traditional stories, your story has a lesson. We watch Iktómi do something that is silly and learn from his mistake. This message is also a commentary on how indigenous people were forcefully removed from their homelands and how incredulous it is to “own the earth.” What are your thoughts on the ability of fictional stories to educate, heal, and work as a bridge between cultures?
Entering fictional words as a reader develops our empathy “muscle.” I remember as a child delighting in the chance to walk in others’ footsteps, fascinated by the experiences of Francie Nolan in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or Anne’s adventures on Prince Edward Island in the Anne of Green Gables series. I was enthralled by the tale of Taran, a young Assistant Pig Keeper in The Book of Three, and I so believed that Narnia was a real place, I knocked on the back walls of every closet I encountered when my family stayed in motels. I was ready to storm my way into another world!
I distinctly remember the first time I read Jane Austen in middle school, being awed by how well I could identify with an author who lived in an era from the distant past. Austen wasn’t Native, she’d never set foot in Chicago or danced at a powwow, yet I felt kin to her in our mutual distaste for hypocrisy. These connections beyond time and space and culture are the first step to developing respect across chasms of difference.
For Volume 25, you were the contributing fiction editor. What was your experience like in this role? Were there any surprises, or anecdotes you could share? Do you have any suggestions for anyone taking on a similar editing role?
I’ve never served as a contributing editor before, so I had a LOT to learn. I was too wedded to following the “rules” laid out in the job description and should have reached out sooner to the wonderful executive editor, Meghan Maloney-Vinz, when I had questions. I’ve always been shy, an introvert, someone who tried to figure things out on her own. But a literary journal is a collaborative effort, and I needed to take advantage of the guidance available to me much sooner in the process.
A lovely surprise is that I’ve become friends with some of the writers whose work was accepted for publication—people who were complete strangers until we began emailing back and forth regarding revision. Ultimately the experience of working with Mubanga Kalimamukwento, a terrific assistant editor and talented writer, and the entire team of dedicated staff and fellow contributing editors, Kao Kalia Yang, and Ed Bok Lee, was deeply rewarding!
What stories or writers are you excited about in the upcoming Volume 25?
Truly, all of them! Each story is so wildly different from the other—stories from all over the globe and from different eras. I’m so grateful for the diversity of experiences and voices. I’m thrilled that I was given the chance to invite writers to contribute a story, and as a result one of my favorite authors, Ernestine Saankaláxt Hayes of the Tlingit Nation, produced a new piece for this forthcoming issue. It startles me to think that the powerful story, “Drowning in Shallow Water,” might not have been written if not for the invitation.
What projects are you working on now?
I’m currently working through the copy-edits of my new novel, A Council of Dolls, which will be published in the summer of 2023 by Mariner/HarperCollins. Before this version of the manuscript, I was working on a new novel, The Year of Fury, narrated by a Dakota woman who has lived for nearly two-hundred years. She’s been given extra mojo that prolongs her life, though to the world she looks as she did when she was still a young mother. She burns through her powers of vengeance too quickly and must learn the purpose and design of her true mission. There are also two short stories that need finishing—one a horror story inspired by actual events.
MONA SUSAN POWER is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, born in Chicago. She is the author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (recipient of a PEN/Hemingway Award), Roofwalker, Sacred Wilderness, and the forthcoming novel, A Council of Dolls, to be published in Summer 2023 by Mariner/HarperCollins. Grants that have supported her writing include an Iowa Arts Fellowship, James Michener Fellowship, Radcliffe Bunting Institute Fellowship, Princeton Hodder Fellowship, USA Artists Fellowship, McKnight Fellowship, and Native Arts & Cultures Foundation Fellowship. She lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
Constellation Route by Matthew Olzmann, Reviewed by Robyn Earhart
There is a picture of the moon that I like to keep on my phone. It’s not a great picture in terms of its quality, nor is the subject matter (the moon) anything unique. The photo was taken during a summer camping trip on a cloudy night hours before a storm ushered in heavy rain. In this picture, the moon appears grainy and subdued, partially blocked by the imposing limbs of a solid oak that would later drop what sounded like millions of acorns on our tent from the storm. The blunt juxtaposition of Earth and cosmos, and the proximal distance of two objects both close and far continues to bewilder me each time I thumb through photos on my phone and come across this image.
Long before maps were created, celestial navigation assisted the earliest humans traversing the globe by ship or by foot, or to track seasonal changes for when to plant and harvest food. Practicality aside, constellations also provided entertainment through oral storytelling, mythology, and some of the earliest forms of astrological predictions. Without the melee of the modern world we know now, the undiscovered aura of the cosmos made humans pay attention, to question, investigate, to confer with other humans about their witnessing.
That fine attunement to whittle something down from abstraction to singularity while succinctly conveying new meaning is often best tasked to poets. When churning in the mind of one as skilled as Matthew Olzmann, readers can expect to witness the most nondescript, overlooked, or unseen of things—a salamander, a rope bridge, a child’s school backpack—in the most liminal of words and spaces in his latest collection, Constellation Route. Through Olzmann’s imagistic lens, we are summoned to imaginative worlds where pigeons teach us that BLT sandwiches are extensions of climate change. We experience the callous audacity of carving one’s initials into one of the oldest pine trees in North America.
Like the earliest humans, we start from the beginning: Day Zero, as the opening poem’s epigraph notes, is the “date when the clock starts of service performance measurement” per the United States Postal Service. It is the day when
The old man in the old house yells, Let there be light,
then flicks a switch on the living room wall
to watch the house come to life.
There will be plenty of both light and darkness. When a collection of work like Constellation Route varies and veers among contemporaneous subjects including the natural world, gun control, or a Black woman’s sense of safety within her block of white neighbors, it needs an orienting guidepost, and the succession of USPS terminology in this collection serves as an innovative device. In service to the requisite work-place jargon of postal employees, the epistolary form is the real star of this collection, a technique that Olzmann dazzles in by creating distinctions that feel effortless to read. In “Letter to Bruce Wayne”, Olzmann searches for real men who share that name, manly men who might be superheroes with
an old flannel
to wear and a square jawline to smile at the world
before he pivots to presenting American society as violent and xenophobic, where men shout
Get out of my country,
from the window of a passing car.
This hypermasculine violence is interrogated again in “Letter to William Shatner”, a poem that bemoans Shatner’s regurgitated appearance with Priceline’s customer service among deftly woven montages from the movie Fight Club. Always, always, the speaker gauges his own proximity to things near and far (and with alarming acuity considering how David Fincher’s 1999 film version of Chuck Palahniuk’s novel has been more recently co-opted by far-right, angry white men):
And just like that: I’m part of the problem. I’ve punched my card and am back
in the He-Man-Spontaneous-Combustion-of-Wrath Society, pacing my
living room and shouting.
When Olzmann considers himself in the company of men “who holler into the wreckage”, he considers the legacy of the great Bengal tiger, best known for their aggressive rage,
their claws, and their fury. They rip things apart. They are beautiful,
but they spend much of their lives alone and are nearly extinct.
Just as the earliest humans viewed the stars with wonderment and wisdom, Olzmann uses them to play with reminiscence and speculation as a type of SOS, perhaps an apology, for how humans have treated our planet. Lead paint and sulfur dioxide stand in for an eon of industrialization, the bellies of animals lined with plastics and jet fuel our overzealousness for the comforts of modernity, all of which have overlooked the incurable consequences for future generations. In “Letter to Someone Living Fifty Years from Now”, Olzmann’s subtle bits of irony aren’t so funny when considering that speculation can easily shift into reality:
There were bees back then, and they pollinated
a euphoria of flowers so we might
contemplate the great mysteries and finally ask,
Hey guys, what’s transcendence?
And then all the bees were dead.
Olzmann’s poetic connections are like the gloaming orb of the moon emphasizing one tiny acorn on the rain awning of a tent: always probing and questioning until the grandest concept is winnowed down. He beckons the reader to experience revelatory intimations. Will the bees be around in 50 years? What else might we lose in our lifetime? How am I connected to this potential collapse? It is moments like this, when Olzmann probes the depths of human emotion, that make this collection soar. Consider this passage from “Fourteen Letters to a 52-Hertz Whale” in which he writes:
Do you ever worry that because your voice is impossible to hear, maybe no one will make the
effort? That you can work really hard and try to be a good person and try to make a difference in
your community, but then—at the end of the day the waves will just swallow you whole? They
will take you under.
You’ll disappear from the world.
And you won’t even leave a ripple on the surface.
For those unfamiliar, the 52-Hertz whale sings at such a high frequency that no other whales can hear them. Dubbed as lonely animals, Olzmann writes a letter to one, speaking on both its intelligence and solitude, its existence as one solitary figure among a sea of others until, in one clarifying swoop, the you in the poem becomes the reader.
According to the Smithsonian, postal contractors were instructed to deliver the mail with “celerity, certainty, and security.” Tired of repeatedly writing the phrase, postal clerks designated new routes with asterisks, and these routes became known as star routes. Much like the state of the cosmos, the titular poem “Constellation Route” is a testament to making order out of chaos:
In moments like these, I want to believe
in a cosmic plan, a higher power orchestrating it all.
Incorporating poems written to him by other writers, including Cathy Linh Che, Jessica Jacobs, Ross White, Mike Scalise, and Vievee Francis, this collection is a richly textured cosmic journey through time and space. Like celestial objects producing light and heat, each poem dazzles into one brilliant cluster with Olzmann as the orchestrator creating a map with which to guide us into new directions.
Robyn Earhart lives in Saint Paul, Minnesota with her husband and pets.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Prageeta Sharma
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—Prageeta Sharma
The featured image is by Barnett Newman, Untitled (1945)
In your poem “The Restoration” in Volume 24, the speaker questions why they continue to “lurch into the structures of emotional hand-me-downs,” yet at the end there is a shift as the speaker describes “becoming an olive tree— / twice removed—supplanted and toughened.” I enjoyed the broad spectrum of emotion in this piece. What was your inspiration for this poem?
Thank you for reading the poem the way you describe it here. I think in this poem I wanted to examine a speaker who is trying to exorcize conflicted feelings; particularly a primary feeling of being haunted by the death of a spouse who was a complicated person and to examine the family (a stepdaughter) she helped raise. In this case, the speaker is me and I am trying to be accountable to how these stirrings impact my new partner. But I also wanted the poem to open up to the theme of hope in the present moment: where we live, walk and witness the landscape around us in real time. Ultimately, the poem “The Restoration” is trying to grapple with new metaphors immersed with old ones.
What was the process like for you with “The Restoration” from first draft to publish-ready. Do you have a particular go-to process, or does it differ poem to poem?
I think my process really differs from poem to poem, but I think in early drafts I’m just trying to locate an emotional or intellectual center of the poem. For me, poems are sketches of thinking and feeling in abstraction. Then I carve them into more rounded entities, into poems. Early drafts reveal conflicts or themes built with a base articulation that I need to get on the page and then I start to fiddle with it and shape it into a kind of a landscape that can hold description, emotion, and form in ways that surprise me. I think this might be an oversimplification, but I guess I’m saying that I don’t really build a poem from images to start it. I build my poems from feelings and theories in my head.
Your poetry book Grief Sequence explores the loss of your husband to cancer. Did you find writing these poems to be cathartic? Of course loss is very difficult to process, what types of responses did you get from your readers?
I did find this book cathartic to write because I didn’t know what these poems were going to be like when I was finished with them but while I was writing them I needed them to function like documentation. I wanted to track a period of grieving and recovery that felt incomprehensible. People did reach out to me that first year of grieving; particularly those who had lost spouses or grieved a complicated or unresolved loss. After many years I now realize that I was grieving a layered loss. Grief Sequence processes Dale’s quick death from a two month diagnosis of esophageal cancer, my journey finding myself and finding a new partner. I am grateful for the new friendships I gained in helping people to process similar circumstances.
As you mature as a poet, do you approach the page differently? What are the new explorations, or intrigues that guide you? Has your process or technique changed over the years?
I’m interested in the theme of maturity and poetry as it relates to style and form. I like to think that my ideas about lyric poetry were always changing and growing deeper. I know with Grief Sequence I became committed to prose poetry for the first time and I had to think about the differing relationships I have to the prose poem and the lyric.
I would say that my earlier books relied on a kind of unconscious conversation with my poetry community (or poetry tradition.) With Grief Sequence I wasn’t thinking about a larger world or speaking about literary forms or culture through a lyric voice. I was thinking about surviving and documenting feelings that felt slippery, complicated, and painful but that also taught me to think about what poetry could solve with its emotional registers and attitudes.
When you look back at the younger version of yourself, the poet just starting out, is there any advice you’d like to give her, perhaps advice that might pertain to other emerging writers?
I wish I could tell the younger version of myself as a poet just starting out to believe that what I want to say or describe or think about is of value. It’s just as simple as that. I think I have gotten so caught up in the past about what someone thinks of my work rather than what is the most enjoyable to write. Writing poetry is believing in the work as I’m writing it and not being too self-conscious about who thinks what. Don’t read your poems over your own shoulder!
You founded the conference Thinking Its Presence: an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. I understand that there will be an upcoming conference in 2023. Could you provide our readers with some information about the purpose of the conference?
Yes, I will have a website up in September which will have registration and the schedule. It’s going to be a pretty exciting lineup of writers, poets, scholars, and artists. I’m collaborating with the Benton Museum of Art and have tremendous support from the English department, Pomona College, and the Claremont Colleges. We hope that our various communities will register, attend, and enjoy the discussion. I would say that the mission of the conference is to host work, discussions, and innovations that might be too risky at more mainstream conferences and to celebrate the innovations in our BIPOC communities.
This year’s conference is called Thinking Its Presence: Racial Vertigo, BlackBrown Feelings and Significantly Problematic Objects, which will take place at Pomona College March 30 to April 2, 2023. We are looking at a very exciting list of writers. Several confirmed are Billy-Ray Belcourt, Myriam J.A. Chancy,Percival Everett, Ruth-Ellen Kocher, James Kyung-Jin Lee, Ishmael Reed, Danzy Senna, Sandy Soto, Brooke Pepion Swaney, Valorie Thomas, and Wardell Milan among many additional stellar people who I’m adding to the roster very soon. I can tell you that the programming is coming together nicely.
Thank you so much for your time, what projects are in your future that we can look forward to?
I’ve been working on a manuscript titled “Onement Won,” which explores ideas of abstraction in the Abstract Expressionist movement (particularly the art of Barnett Newman), racial grief, and the problem of the aphorism in Hinduism. Some are lyric poems that are more direct and function like “The Restoration” where I write with a new sense of purpose. There are some new poems which grapple with my current partner’s stage four cancer diagnosis (which we have been devastated by but are doing our best to negotiate).
The new poems are a place for me to articulate the pain of detaching from my past and being immersed in living fully in my present moment (especially now that we are facing such an aggressive cancer). I am finally registering that I have brought more healing into my life, and this has been activated through my love of poetry and consciously committing to deep reciprocity with those who can share it in love and friendship.
PRAGEETA SHARMA’s recent poetry collection, Grief Sequence, was published by Wave Books. She is the founder of the conference Thinking Its Presence, an interdisciplinary conference on race, creative writing, and artistic and aesthetic practices. She was a recipient of the 2010 Howard Foundation Award and a finalist for the 2020 Four Quartets Prize. She taught at the University of Montana and now teaches at Pomona College.
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—W. Todd Kaneko
In The Field: Conversations With Our Contributors—W. Todd Kaneko
There’s a sweetness of presence in your poem “Horsepower” as well as a complexity in a singular moment which I found intriguing. You take us on a journey through the simple observation of a cluster of horses by the side of the road. Could you speak to the inspiration and the process of creating this poem?
I have been passing those horses on my way to work for years. They graze in their meadow in fall and spring and stand around under their blankets in the winter. It’s a quiet, lonely commute, particularly now that my wife and I drive separately in case we get called to pick up one of our kids early from school or daycare. But also, I worry about my kids a lot, particularly during the pandemic and particularly when I am stuck in the car driving to work. I would love to be able to say to my son, hey look at the horses like he’s in the back seat and everything is normal, but of course, he’s not and nothing is normal and that’s where the poem started.
Your other poem in Volume 24, “First Person Shooter” is filled with references to our dysfunctional nation. It includes references to immigrant children separated from their parents at our southern border while the speaker in the poem rests comfortably in his home playing armageddon-like video games, one ear listening for his sleeping son. This juxtaposition between real tragedy and imaginary, as well as the need of a father to protect his child is visceral, creating a discomfort in the reader. What are your thoughts about how poetry can speak to societal problems, and can poetry, and art in general, work toward societal change?
I’m hesitant to say that poetry or art actually works toward societal change—that makes it sound like writing poems is equivalent to the labor that activists do to effect change in the world. But I do think that if you are a human being who is capable of empathy, you can’t go through the world and not notice the many fronts on which people are failed by the societies they live in. And for a lot of poets, particularly those who belong to populations that have been failed by the social structures to which they are bound, these things naturally find their way into the poems. How can they not?
On the other hand, poetry is meant to activate a reader, emotionally at least, and I suppose it’s possible for that emotional activation to spur a reader or viewer into action. I think that art can work toward societal change, but I think there’s a huge difference between making poetry or art that speaks to societal problems, and being out in the world, boots on the ground, to make things happen. Both are important in their own ways, but conflating the two is dangerous, I think.
Your poetry collection “This Is How the Bone Sings” explores the painful history and trauma caused by Minidoka, a Japanese concentration camp constructed in Idaho during World War II. I couldn’t help but notice the connection between that time period and the one today where immigrants are housed on our southern border, referenced in your poem “First Person Shooter.” Am I correct in assuming that these stories are personal? What does it say about us as a nation when we continue to repeat these atrocities against vulnerable populations? Is there a way to break these cycles?
Yes, those stories are personal—my father and his parents were incarcerated in Idaho during World War II, and it’s something I think about every day, especially now that they all have passed. My grandmother once said that if the United States were to put citizens in concentration camps again, she would protest on the front lines. In fact, there have been a number of Japanese American camp survivors who have worked as activists against the camps on our southern border.
Is there a way to break these cycles? I don’t know—I don’t really have those kinds of answers in me. I reckon probably not because the cycle of dehumanization and oppression is so ingrained into our country’s history and present, and maybe our future too. I do think that refusing to let people forget that the atrocities of the present day are connected to the atrocities of the past is important. I am currently raising a six-year-old and a pair of twins who will be two soon, and as much as I would like to follow my grandmother’s sense of duty towards those who are incarcerated, childcare pretty much kicks my ass every day. My wife and I try to make sure our kids know their family history with the hope that understanding where they come from encourages them to grow up into conscientious adults who live conscientious lives. That’s the extent of what I can manage, for now.
I noticed that you reference pop culture in your poetry, from Slash of Guns N’ Roses to the wrestler Andre the Giant. How does pop culture shape your work and what can you advise to artists interested in exploring pop culture references in their work?
I know a lot of writers struggle with this kind of thing on the one hand because we get pop culture trained out of us for the sake of trying to stand the test of time over being timely in the moment. On the other hand, it’s because pop culture is supposedly lowbrow and readers aren’t going to get all the references. But I think that poetry is best when it’s about the world we live in, the experiences and culture that surrounds us every day: the songs on the radio, the TV shows we watch, the covers of those magazines staring us down at the grocery checkout. It’s where we live most immediately, and yet, we often assign adjectives to the word culture so we can categorize and dismiss: high culture, low culture, pop culture, foreign culture: it’s all just culture worthy of writing about, for me. Sure maybe a reader doesn’t know anything about Black Panther, but looking at what’s playing at the movies or on Netflix, it’s ridiculous to pretend that super heroes aren’t a thing, you know? And it’s okay if some people don’t get the references because every poem doesn’t have to be for every person. And if you are still seeing pop culture in your poem as a reference and not the world, maybe the poem hasn’t fully embraced its subject matter. So this is my take on pop culture in poetry—I just write about the things that are in front of me because I think it’s worth writing about.
You collaborated with Amorak Huey for a few large projects, including the poetry book “Slash / Slash” as well as the craft book “Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology.” How did your collaboration originate, and what is it like to work on a book with another writer?
Amorak and I are in a writing group together, we teach in the same department (our offices are across the hall from one another), and his house is probably only about a mile away from mine. We both wrote a couple of Guns N’ Roses poems separately, so it made sense when he texted me to say that we should just write some Guns N’ Roses poems together and we ended up coming up with Slash / Slash. We had already collaborated on the textbook, which was a different kind of writing, so we already knew some of the basic parameters for our collaboration: relinquishing sole ownership of the poems we write, putting aside our egos where they interfere with the work, and having fun with poetry.
But like I said, I know Amorak and his work pretty well, and he knows me—so we had built up a lot of trust between us. It was easy for me to give him a draft of a poem to work on and it was fun to receive a draft of his, knowing I had permission to do whatever I wanted with it. There is a challenge on the TV show called Top Chef where one chef starts cooking and then a second chef has to come in half way through, identify what the first chef’s plan was and finish the dish. That was pretty much what our collaboration was like—you get a draft and can see what the poem is trying to do, what the poet was trying to do, and then you get to go in and try to make the whole thing work. Sometimes I served up some heaps of terrible poetry and he gave them back to me looking like real poems. It was like magic. And super fun. Everyone should try collaborating on writing poems. Maybe with your best poetry friend. Or with Amorak, if he’s available.
What are some projects that you are working on now, or planning for the future?
I have lots of plans but like I said, childcare is a problem for us these days. I have more projects than I can possibly work on at the moment. I have been playing with this sequence of prose poems about the video game Fallout 4 (the game I was playing when I wrote “First Person Shooter”), but then recently I decided that maybe they are really flash essays about America, contemporary and historical and hypothetical—or maybe it’s a long essay that is made up of short flash essays about gaming through post-apocalypse America—I’m not sure what it is yet, but this is the project that currently has my attention, partly because I’m interested to see where these pieces will take me, and partly because I just want to play and think about video games right now.
TODD KANEKO is the author of the poetry books This is How the Bone Sings (Black Lawrence Press 2020) and The Dead Wrestler Elegies (New Michigan Press 2021). He is co-author with Amorak Huey of Poetry: A Writers’ Guide and Anthology (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), and Slash / Slash, winner of the 2020 Diode Editions Chapbook Prize. A Kundiman Fellow, he teaches at Grand Valley State University and lives with his family in Grand Rapids, Michigan.