Kontemporary Narratives: A Conversation with John Murillo on Freestyling, Heroic Crowns, and the Invented Self
John Murillo is the author of the poetry collections Up Jump the Boogie (Cypher 2010, Four Way Books 2020), finalist for both the Kate Tufts Discovery Award and the Pen Open Book Award, and Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry (Four Way 2020), winner of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award and the Poetry Society of Virginia’s North American Book Award, and finalist for the PEN/Voelcker Award for Poetry, Believer Poetry Award, Maya Angelou Book Award, Hurston/Wright Foundation Legacy Award and the NAACP Image Award. His other honors include the Four Quartets Prize from the T.S. Eliot Foundation and the Poetry Society of America, two Larry Neal Writers Awards, a pair of Pushcart Prizes, the J Howard and Barbara MJ Wood Prize from the Poetry Foundation, an NYSCA/NYFA Artist Fellowship, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Bread Loaf Writers Conference, Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Cave Canem Foundation, and the Wisconsin Institute for Creative Writing. Murillo’s poems have appeared in such publications as American Poetry Review, Poetry, and Best American Poetry 2017, 2019, and 2020. Currently, he is an associate professor of English and director of the creative writing program at Wesleyan University.
On March 10, 2022, John Murillo joined The Interlochen Review editors Sam Haviland and Avery Gendler, along with creative writing major Sophie Bernik, for a conversation about his recent poetry collection Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry.
Sam Haviland: There’s a poem in your newest book where the speaker is asked what they think of contemporary American poetry, however in the poem the speaker never answers. I’m wondering why you posed this question? And if possible would you be willing to answer this question for us now?
John Murillo: What I think about contemporary American poetry?
SH: Yeah.
JM: So I wrote that poem after I was coming out of this religious thing I was doing. There was a year and seven days initiation process where I had to step away from the world for a little bit, and when I came out of it I was noticing the conversations that poets were having around poetry and how so little of it had anything to do with poetry. I remember specifically being in a car with other poets, we were in Kansas City on our way to a reading, and the poets were talking about some looming deadlines and these applications they were trying to get in for fellowships and things. And I remember looking out of the window to my right and there was just the most beautiful sunset I’d ever seen. I mean the sky was just all kinds of shades of purple and pink, and I interrupted the conversation like,“Hey guys, check out the sunset!” And they paused for a minute but then went right back to their conversation, “like you know you only got that because—” And I was so disheartened.
It made me think about a trip that I had taken to London a few months earlier, while I was with some poets and we were talking about favorite poems, poems that moved us. And maybe it was because we had no awards in common, all the writers were from other parts of the world, and we had no deadlines in common so that wasn’t the topic of conversation. But it just really struck me how superficial the conversations among American poets have become.
Right now, I’d say I’m encouraged and also disheartened by the state of contemporary American poetry. I’m encouraged because there’s so much good poetry being written, there’s poets of all ages. There’s younger poets and older poets. There’s a lot going on. When people say they don’t like poetry, you know that’s like saying you don’t like music. You may not like classical, you may not like country, but you like something. And I think the same could be said for poetry. There is a type of poetry for each person, you just haven’t found it yet. Right now with the gates kind of being blown open, the playing field is a lot more level than it’s ever been, I’ll say. In that sense it’s exciting.
It’s also disheartening because that other thing still exists. Where people really are caught up in the careerism of it, caught up in how many followers they have, and things that have nothing to do with poetry. So there’s that. Teaching and working with young people like yourselves gives me hope because people are coming to the world that really care about poetry and the work that poetry can do. It lets me know that it’s in good hands.
SH: Kind of bouncing off that, what made you choose that for the title, Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, of the collection as a whole?
JM: I looked into this yesterday, a lot of the poems in the book are in conversation with the tradition and also a critique of the tradition. That title poem you mentioned is the centerpiece of the book, which is weird because when people talk about the book they talk about the poems that have to do with police violence and domestic violence, and very few readers pick up on the critique of the culture. But for me that was the driving force.
So, I wanted the title to be Contemporary American Poetry. But my publisher worried that if it was still the regular way—Contemporary American Poetry with a C—people might look at the cover and think it was either a very short anthology or a critical text of some sort. So we were trying to think of ways to make it clear that it was a creative work. So we played with different ideas—maybe a colon after Contemporary American and then Poetry, but that didn’t work. And I don’t know how it came to me but I just thought instead of ‘c’s have ‘k’s so Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry.
Then something happened once the book started getting out into the world and people started asking me about it. Someone said something about, you know, it’s evocative of the KKK and those days. And I said huh, I didn’t intend that but that’s kind of cool, because when you see the two ‘k’s you look for the third and it’s not there but it’s implied and it’s always under the surface. Kind of like racism or white supremacy. It’s not always burning crosses and tiki torch marching, sometimes it can be as simple as a microaggression. For instance we’re in Cancun right now at this resort and there’s probably close to one hundred people here, it’s not very crowded. And out of the hundred we’ve seen maybe two other black couples and you can really tell by people’s attitudes that they don’t really feel we deserve to be in the same place. They don’t say anything but it’s in the body language, the looks and the gestures. White supremacy is often as subtle as that unseen ‘k.’
Sophie Bernik: I wanted to ask about these recurring themes of passivity versus action in your most recent collection. For instance, in “Dolores, Maybe” the speaker seems to be wrestling with some insecurity about never knowing the girl the poem's title is eponymous for. And these concepts certainly seem to come up all throughout the second section of the collection where the poems are largely in reference to police brutality and protest. I was wondering if you could speak to this a little bit more and why passivity and action were ideas you seemed to keep coming back through throughout the collection?
JM: Yeah, that’s a great question. Because those are concepts that keep coming back to me in my life. What I mean by that is the book is trying to do a lot of things at once, and I don’t really know how successful I was able to be with any of them. But one of the things I was trying to do with the book, in addition to being a critique of contemporary American poetry and the culture at large, was to kind of interrogate this notion of self. The invented self, the self we put forward and the true self. That's why if you notice the epigraph to the collection, there are two, one by Larry Levis, “I know this isn’t much, but I wanted to explain this life to you. Even if I had to become, over the years, someone else to do it.” Then the next one, “you’re lying said memory, you’re asleep said forgetfulness.”
One of the things that was really fascinating to me while I was writing this was the stories that we tell about ourselves. And more often than not we become the heroes in our own stories. The stories that we tell about ourselves in order to live with ourselves. I think a lot about the culture and the drive to perform benevolence, to perform ethical behavior instead of actually being a good or ethical person. One of the things that I noticed when I was looking over my life, was in how retelling certain stories from childhood and adolescence I was a lot more courageous than I really was. I was a lot more noble. So a lot of the poems in the collection were my attempt to deal as honestly as I could while also writing well crafted poems. There are poems that deal with domestic violence, which I witnessed as a child. There are poems where I witnessed violence out and about in the neighborhood and was kind of stunned into inactivity, into passivity. So a lot of writing these poems had to do with me kind of working through that.
I was watching this video recently about this guy, his name was Hulk. And he was this huge body builder, you know massive, and the video had to do with his own childhood trauma, how he suffered child abuse and his response to it. And his response was to get as huge and massive and as dangerous-looking and intimidating-looking as he could, because he carried that guilt with him for so long for having stood by watching his sister and mother be abused. A lot of the poems come out of the same kind of experience.
You know that TV show “What Would You Do?”
Interviewers: YES!
JM: I would be horrible at that show. Because they would come up to me afterwards and ask me “why didn’t you do anything?” and I’d just be like “I don’t know.” But I always imagine myself as being the one who steps in and speaks up for others. And I guess the writing allows for some of that. Even the centerpiece, the long poem, it has to do with passivity and wishing I had done something, but maybe in writing the poem I have. There’s a line an African proverb actually, “singing is swinging and writing is fighting,” and maybe it’s true.
Avery Gendler: We talked about this a little bit yesterday and already a little bit today, but a lot of the poems in the collection like “Variation On A Theme By Elizabeth Bishop” and “Poem Ending and Beginning On Lines By Larry Levis” spin off of lines by other poets. I’m wondering what that process looks like for putting your poetry in conversation with others? Could you elaborate on that?
JM: Again the blank page is so intimidating, right. Think about it, even entering into a conversation with someone it’s a lot harder to get the conversation started than to respond to a question. For me what happens often when I’m sitting down to the page is if I can’t get anything going I’ll draw on someone else's poems. That first line could be the call and my poem can be the response. More often than not what I’ll do is I’ll then get rid of the call, the line that initiated it. You know what I told you guys yesterday, once you start drafting to get rid of the refrains so there’s no trace of the original.
But in the case for instance of those two poems, the Larry Levis poem and the Elizabeth Bishop poem—in the Elizabeth Bishop poem her influence was so prevalent throughout that there was no hiding it, so I just leaned into it and went ahead and put it as the title and you know my back is covered there. With the Larry Levis poem, because he’s such a better poet than I, it just so happened that the first and last lines were the best lines of the poem. Get rid of those and the poem just doesn’t stand as well, so keep those lines but tell everyone else I’m keeping those lines and it worked out. It’s a good strategy. If you guys ever find yourself getting stuck, just pull out your favorite book of poems and pull out a line or an image and see where it takes you.
SH: You make a lot of very purposeful decisions with form, a few of the poems that stuck out to me formally were “On Confessionalism” and “On Magic Realism.” You kind of invent some of your own forms throughout the collection, so I’m wondering how you go about making formal decisions? And does the content affect the form or vice versa? That’s something we talk a lot about in the Writing House.
JM: For me I don’t know that I would say I invent the forms. You know I haven’t really thought of them as forms or named them, but it’s always driven by what the poem needs. Inventing forms is really popular now, a lot of poets come out with books and they have their own forms they’ve created. Often it feels like they do it just to have done it and to be able to say that I’m the creator of this form. But then the rules of the form, I wonder, do they really serve the poem. Why have so many syllables per line or why have this line repeat other than it’s cool to do. The received forms I think, and I’m not an expert, but my study of them so far has shown that they came out of a need. There’s a reason the sonnet works the way it does, there’s a reason a haiku works the way it does. There’s a reason for instance in a sonnet that the volta or the turn happens not at the mid-way, not after the seventh line, but after the eighth line. It’s top heavy. There’s something to the mathematics of it and a ratio. There’s a reason that for instance in a play that the first act is usually longer than the second act. It has to do with audience, with attention spans and things like that. So in my work when I’m looking at what a poem needs and how structure feeds into that it comes wholly out of that. So content I think drives it more than anything else. As an exercise though it can be useful to invent a form just to give yourself a set of constraints and see what comes out of them. I wouldn’t then impose that on other poems, it just, it becomes for me as a reader like watching a magician do the same trick over and over. Right? So the first time you see a form you go, “oh, that’s cool I see how it works.” And then it’s, “oh, it’s cool, what else can it do.” You know, are you hitting me in the gut, are you doing something besides just being new and cool? Because things are only new once and then what.
SB: Switching gears a little bit, in the second section of Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry, you included a crown of sonnets preceded by quotes. I was wondering if this specific crown was planned ahead of time to be included within a larger project or if it found itself placed in the book during the process of working on either.
JM: Yeah, I had most of the other poems written and I knew the centerpiece was gonna be the crown. In the notes section in the back of the book, I talk about what led to the crown. The poetry rally we had in the park and the double murder suicide that happened that day. And I needed a form that would allow me, that was expansive enough, to allow me to really deal with all these different emotions and feelings and histories. But also I needed something that had enough constraints, that would force me to make some thoughtful decisions in terms of each moment and what each moment's aim was.
So I knew I was gonna do a crown. Also if you noticed it's a broken crown. It’s actually in backwards order. Usually the way crowns work the last line of the one poem becomes the first line of the other and it wraps around until it connects with the first and last lines of the poem. This is a heroic crown. So the last sonnet, number fifteen, is comprised of the first lines of all the other poems. One thing I’ve noticed is when I’m reading a crown of sonnets, once I pick up on it, I rush to the ending of one to get to the next one. I can’t really hold that silence. I’ve heard poets when they’re reading their own crowns aloud also rush through that silence. I wanted a way to honor that silence but also provide for that echo that the repetition gives.
So in reversing the order of the poems, for instance if go to page forty and forty one [in Kontemporary Amerikan Poetry] you’ll notice the first line on page forty, “We changed the channel and it’s him again” is the last line on page forty one: “We changed the channel and fuck it’s him again.” The way a crown should read usually is the last line on page forty, “Not these but pipe bombs, hands to light the fuse” should be the first line on the next page where it says, “A black man dancing through the night beams.” You still get the callback when you get to the bottom of page forty one, but it’s not so immediate.
Then the other thing is I linked them together with the epigraphs from African American male poets because it wasn’t just my song to sing. I wanted to get other voices in there, particularly at a time when I felt like black people, black men in particular, were under fire from all corners and so I wanted this to be a kind of shoutout and a sign of love to my brothers.
AG: Thank you. I’m going to ask a follow-up question based on that because I really liked the use of history. The form itself is historical and then also the historical stories and narratives are brought in. There is this very modern feel to all the imagery and the language. I was wondering if you could just speak on that.
JM: On the relationship between history and the modern feel?
AG: History and modern language and narrative in this historical box.
JM: I’ve never given it much thought so I’m kind of freestyling an answer for you. I think for me it has to do with time and contemporality. We tend to think of time as it moves linearly, but history repeats itself so often that it's not even history. It’s always current events. I think about an essay by James Baldwin written in 1950 being just as relevant today. It should not be so relevant seventy years later. But even as we advance as a society, we also stand still and sometimes regress. Time is always moving in different directions: forwards, backwards, side to side, in circles. I’m using a very old form, the sonnet. I’m talking about contemporary events. And sadly, these poems will be relevant probably fifty years from now too. So I’m also projecting my voice into the future.
SB: That's really interesting, thank you. There are a lot of informal rhymes in your poems, or a lot of rhymes not necessitated by form. Could you possibly speak to any influences that led you to include more informal rhyme in your poetry given that contemporary poetry generally leans away from it?
JM: Yeah, I think we lose something in that right. Lawrence Ferlinghetti wrote that the printing press ruined poetry. And I think what he meant by that is when people started writing for the page, they lost the sonic qualities and the aural pleasures of poetry. Poems are meant to be sung. They're meant to be said aloud. The poetry that exists on the page is a record of that, but it is still an utterance. A lot of contemporary poets and writers of unrhymed poems use that.
On the other hand, you don’t want your poems to be sing-songy. The predictable end rhyme can actually distract from the poem. Once you know there's a rhyme pattern, you listen for that and you may miss the imagery or you might miss the argument being made. What I try to do in a lot of poems is to play with rhyme, different kinds of rhyme. I use slant rhyme a lot, internal rhyme. Even more than rhyme I like the assonance and consonance. There are certain things that make a line cohere sonically without calling a lot of attention to itself and distracting from what's being said in the poem. But it’s a resource that I’ve been developing since I was eleven when I first started rapping and maybe even earlier than that. We all grew up on nursery rhymes— stories that had something musical that held it together for us and made us want to lean forward and pay attention as children.
I remember going to a reading a few years ago. I don't remember the poet's name. It was an older poet, maybe in her seventies or eighties. She was reading these really formal ababcdcd rhyme poems and just killing it. There is something so old and ancient and has so much gravitas in it. I mean the silence in the room when this older poet was reading was a different kind of silence than when anybody else was reading. There is a courteous silence when you’re just kind of there and there's also the rapt silence where everyone is leaning forwards and waiting for each word. I think her use of rhyme had a lot to do with that.
SH: As someone who writes a lot of narrative poetry, how do you think the poetic form changes the way you tell a story and do you think it changes the way a story is received?
JM: I think I'm primarily a storyteller. My wife is more of a lyric poet than I am and in some ways I'm very jealous of that. Maybe I’m hybrid, a lyric-narrative poet. I think most of my favorite poets are. But I'm not a novelist. What the poems allow, or rather what they require is compression, is intensity, a certain kind of intensity you may not need in a longer form, a heightened awareness of structure. If I have a poem of two pages and I'm doing time jumps and there are digressions and a lot of internal dialogue, I really need to be mindful of how I’m managing that on the page.
And also, I want the poems to live in the air. One thing I do is I like to go to readings. I like to not only listen to the reader but listen to the audience and watch the audience and kind of feel how they're responding. When audiences tune out mostly is when they don’t feel they’re being spoken to. A lot of poetry, particularly lyric poetry, feels like often just language that's floating around in the air and it doesn't mean to land with any listener. But if you listen to a fiction writer read, they’re telling you a story that they mean for you to listen to. There's something about that I find very compelling so I try to bring that into the poem as well. It's not just the telling of a story, but an awareness of a listener. The lyric narrative poem allows for all that to happen at once in a way that I found pretty magical as a reader.
SB: In addition to narrative poems, you also include a lot of longer poems in your most recent collection, for instance “Poem Ending and Beginning on Lines by Larry Levis” or “On Prosody.” Could you speak to the process of writing a longer poem and balancing its many parts?
JM: It's easier for me than writing a shorter poem, believe it or not. It’s like these answers, you know, once I get going, you guys are asking these short questions and I’m giving these long-ass answers, you know.
When I'm writing a narrative poem, usually I have a couple of strands going. It's just a matter of managing how do I stick this landing. If the subject is compelling enough, it takes me a while to work through. It takes a while for the poem to wrap and then I usually have to cut back on that. So what you see as an eight page poem may have been eighteen at some point. It's a matter of compressing and chiseling away.
It's weird though. I think when I first started writing, I was really writing short lyrics. I think that it's a different talent, a talent that I don't have yet but I want to develop—to be able to trust the reader and to leave some things unsaid and leave space for the reader to fill in. I think, at least in these first two books, I was so insistent on my reader hearing the story and wanting to know what I was getting at that I didn't leave a lot off the table. I think it worked out okay with these poems, but I want to allow for a little more mystery in the next poems I write.
AG: I was really struck by the bleeding title “Upon Reading That Eric Dolphy Transcribed Even the Calls of Certain Species of Bird.” Do you usually title your poems before or after you write them?
JM: I might have a working title often but more often than not, I would say 98% of the time the title comes a few drafts in or towards the end. With that one, I think it just kind of came to me because it was very literal. I was reading this article that came out in the New York Times about Eric Dolphy and also I was reading some John Keats at the time. He has a poem on first reading Chapman's Homer, which was a translation of Homer that removed him, so that's actually considered one of his really successful poems. So that was playing in my head as well. It was kind of a nod to Keats too. For the most part, they announce themselves to me later on.
SH: How did you go about putting together this collection, especially when centering it around a larger sequence like the sonnet crown?
JM: At Wesleyan, a lot of our writers do honors theses in creative writing, so I supervise a lot of these senior projects. When I'm getting with my students and we're looking at their plans for the thesis, I tell them: write the poems, then see what you have. It’s never easy. If you’re doing it right, writing is never easy. In terms of assembling a collection or a manuscript, it's a lot easier to look at what you have and then put it together than to try to think of the project ahead of time.
I’ll give you an example. I don’t know how familiar you guys are with New York City, but there are five boroughs: Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Let's say I'm writing poems and some take place in Brooklyn, some take place in the Bronx, and some take place in Manhattan. And I’ll say, “Oh, I know what I’ll do. I'm going to write a book of 5 sections and each section is going to be poems in each borough.” But guess what? I never go to Staten Island. I have no reason to ever go to Staten Island. Now I'm stuck. Now the project is driving the poems. I'm going to write filler poems because I have nothing to say about that place.
So when I'm putting together a collection, I just write, lay out the poems on the floor, and see what happens. Now these poems are in conversation with each other, they might make a section. These two poems are doing very similar things. I may not need both of them, this may be redundant, this might be doing it better than this one. These poems could go back to back but what if I put one in the beginning and one at the end and then there's a callback as a thread.
I liken it to a DJ spinning a set. You can't hang your set unless the records already exist.
As far as the centerpiece poem goes, again most of the poems were written. I knew this was going to be the arc. It's a little out of step with the rest of the collection when you think about it. The rest of the collection has to do with memory, home. But this centerpiece is all one topic so it had to be sectioned off. In my first book, there's also a centerpiece poem. You write the poems first and then see what you have.
SB: In that same vein, you often reference dates and years throughout the collection: 1997, 1981, etc. I was wondering how you see this nonlinear timeline of sorts established throughout the collection working in conjunction with the actual order of poems?
JM: Well that’s how memory works, right? We never think back on our childhood chronologically, from our first birthday moving forwards. You’re thinking about your first day of kindergarten and the next thing you know you jump to Prom. Then you’re thinking back to something that happened in the third grade. Memory happens in those flashes all out of order.
There’s that, and also if I’m being honest with you guys, some of this stuff is made up. For instance, the thing in 1997 didn’t happen in 1997. It happened in 1994 when I was actually walking down the street and I saw the birds. But 1997 to 1977, that gives me a clean twenty years. And 77 and 97 just sound better to the ear. Now let’s say I wanted it to be factual—1994 and twenty years before that is 1974, then I was only three years old, and that doesn’t work. That’s a lie, so I need to make myself at least six years old. You just do those kinds of things.
The “Dolores Maybe” poem, even though I said in the poem that this was real, I was also making some stuff up. When I was in middle school, there was a kid. He climbed up an electrical wire and touched it and got electrocuted and died. I remember coming back to school in the 8th grade and seeing his picture in memorial in the yearbook. I wanted to write about him for the longest time. And there was another girl who had passed. So I conflated all these stories together to make the narrative in this poem. The coyote was going to be its own poem, and it wasn’t a coyote, it was just a dog. My father used to make me walk to school, this long walk to school, and I used to walk past this dead dog by the railroad tracks. Throughout the whole school year I just saw him decomposing and it was gross. He was a dog, then he was bones and matted fur, and at some point he became just a part of the ground. It didn’t make for a very compelling poem on its own so I brought it into the “Dolores Maybe” poem.
I tell my students all the time, and I think I got this from Richard Hugo in his book The Triggering Town where he said, “You owe the facts nothing, you owe the poem everything.” So if I need to change a year, if I need to do this, if I need to tell the memories out of order, then that’s what I do.
AG: Many of your poems powerfully address racial injustice and police brutality in America, specifically “Mercy, Mercy Me” and “A Refusal To Mourn The Deaths, By Gunfire, Of Three Men in Brooklyn.” How do you view your role as a poet in addressing these conflicts?
JM: I push back on shoulds: a poet should do this, a poet should do that, a poet should be socially engaged. I don’t think a poet has more responsibility than any other citizen. I think teachers should be socially engaged, I think nurses and garbage men, you know, if that’s in you. I think poets should write the poems they’re compelled to write. If you’re a lovesick person, be a lovesick poet. If you’re a cruel person, be a cruel poet. It just so happens that violence has been such a part of my upbringing and life, up to this point, and police violence has always loomed. Particularly since adolescence, it’s something that was always there. In recent years with the advent of camera phones and the way that information can be spread via social media, we can see a lot of these. You can go now on YouTube and type in police beatings or police shootings, and you can actually see videos that you’d never be able to access before.
And then with Michael Brown, with Breonna Taylor. We can just plug in a name. In recent years, George Floyd—the protests and everything came to a head where these things were really on my mind. Also, I’m in a different stage of my life now. I’m a grown ass man, but I have students who are just where I was when the Rodney King Riots happened in 1992. I remember feeling exactly how they’re feeling now and I had no answers for them. For me, poems are often a way to work out certain things. It’s not therapy or catharsis exactly. But it’s a place I often go to work through and flesh out some of the things that are often getting to me. And as with many people, I would say most of us, police brutality, corruption, murder, all these things have been on our mind a lot lately.
AG: As both a poet and a human being, what brings you hope at this point in our pandemic world?
JM: This is going to sound corny as hell, I know, but I mean this with every fiber of my being, with my bones, my blood, my heart, my skin—you guys. Deadass. I teach, and I love my students. They frustrate me sometimes, but you guys are so much better than we were when I was your age: how socially engaged you are, your understanding of things, your drive to be better human beings. I think in general, racism, homophobia, transphobia, sexism, all these things aren’t as tolerated as they were when I was coming up. And just the human beings you are, that gives me hope.
One of the things I love about teaching: one, I get to talk about poetry all day and everyday and think about it and write it with people that care about it: but also, college campuses are beautiful. I go to work everyday, especially in the autumn with all the trees, and I walk across campus and I’ll be like, “damn, this is where I work.” And all the buildings. Wesleyan’s beautiful, you guys should check it out. The foliage. And I get to talk to and be around smart, cool, young people who want to make the world better. And that’s the only way.
My wife and I recently decided not to have children, and one of the things we talked about was how shitty the world is. And I remember saying the world is shitty because there’s shitty people in it, but there’s also some amazing people in it. The only way to counterbalance it is to put some more amazing people in it. So working with you guys, it gives me hope.
AG: I have one more question, can we ask what you’re working on right now? Or if you are working on anything besides teaching?
JM: It’s hard now, to be honest. Teaching, directing the creative writing program at the university, takes up a lot of time. So I’m doing more reading than anything right now. I still try to make time for the writing, take stabs at it. But nothing really compelling is coming right now. It’s frustrating because ten years passed between the first and second book and I don’t want there to be ten years between the second and third book. It might be that way. The book came out in 2020. I did a lot of readings. So between that and teaching and everything I haven’t had a lot of time.
Also, I think time needs to pass. I need to become a different person to write the poems I’m going to write. You know the next book and the poems I’m hoping to write will draw more on imagination than memory. I want to try different voices out and get out of the autobiographical work, or at least quasi-autobiographical “I.” Try out some personas, do some more ekphrastic work. I’m reading new poets, I’m reading old poets I haven’t had the time to get into before. I’m just trying and I’m failing everyday when I come to the page. Luckily I have a sabbatical next year, so I have some time to really just devote to the poems.
Oh also I’m working on, editing with my wife, an anthology of letters, poems, essays about Yusef Komonyakaa the poet. So that’s due out from Wesleyan University press in 2024. We’re curating that. It’s work, it’s not poems, but it’s still work.
SH: I do have a question that’s been on my mind since yesterday. With poetry personally I haven’t done a lot of writing and revising on my own, it’s always been in conjunction with being at Interlochen and having all these people around me to work with. But your process, because you’re not a student at a place where you can collaborate all the time, seems more solitary. And considering the fact that you’re not doing a lot right now, I’m wondering how you go about the work without that network that we kind of have.
JM: It changes. I have readers. I have friends of mine who are poets. Actually it’s kind of bad, almost all my friends are poets. I need to diversify a bit. But there are a couple of people if I’m working on a poem or a manuscript who I’ll send it out to and get their eyes on. So there’s that.
But ultimately the work is done alone in a room. It’s its own kind of challenge, but there’s a freedom to it too. Being in a classroom you have deadlines and you’re accountable, so it keeps you writing. But when you’re on your own you have the freedom to work at your own pace, to allow your poems to develop organically without other eyes to look at them until they're ready. But the challenge is different, the challenge is then, if there’s not a classroom of peers and a teacher to keep me accountable, how do I make sure I’m doing the work?
Because again like I said yesterday it’s true—nobody cares if I write another book, there’s so many books that will never get read, good books, great books that exist. Today’s March 10th, 2022. There could be a moratorium right now if no one else ever published a book ever, and guess what? We’ll be fine because there’s so much good stuff already written that we haven’t gotten to. So because there’s not the demand on you, how do you keep yourself going.
Friends will invite you out to dinner or to a party more than they’ll check on you to see if you’re staying home and writing. Writing’s not always pleasant, and I’d much rather watch Netflix sometimes than write a poem. Watching Netflix isn’t hard work. So, then there’s the other thing where people say it’s all writing, everything I’m doing, I’m always writing. Yes and no. The Netflix show I watch is going to give me images and language that might find its way into a poem, but at the same time if I fall into that there’s the danger of never getting to the page. I’ve been binge watching “Snowfall” for as long as it’s been on and those are hours that are not spent at the writing desk. Today after I get off this and my class, then I’m about to go on the beach. I’m going to spend the day at the beach chilling. Those are hours not spent writing. The challenge then is how do you hold yourself accountable for your art when no one is really demanding it of you.
AG: Thank you so much. I don’t know if you have anything else to say before we wrap it up.
JM: I don’t, no. Just you guys keep doing what you’re doing. You’ll probably go on to writing careers. Try as best you can to hold onto that first joy and remember what brought you to the page in the beginning. You didn’t set out to do this because you wanted to be rich, famous, or “successful.” To get this prize or that prize. There was something in you that you loved about writing or reading, never lose that because really that’s what’s going to sustain you if you do choose a career in this, through the dry periods.