Tucked Away: Dual Lives in David R. Altman’s “Death in the Foyer”

by JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp

For me, summers are for regrouping and re-reading favorite books.  One such work by David R. Altman, “Death in the Foyer,” continues to sink the plumb line of my appreciation for his attention to instinct and motive each time I read it.  “Death in the Foyer,” published by Finishing Line Press in 2014, is Altman’s debut chapbook. His website can be found at http://www.davidraltman.com.

“Death in the Foyer” contains a series of vignettes that convey the message nature may contain mysteries, but people keep secrets.

 The first of these is the book’s titular poem about a man who suddenly, and without resistance, succumbs to an aneurism in his home’s foyer. Altman’s use of an omniscient voice places the reader in an awkward position of knowing more than the dying man’s devoted wife whose “warm fingers [protect] now what no longer needs protecting.” 

Suddenly, the reader knows perhaps more than they should. Without warning, we’re in on it as the speaker divulges how, “his final thoughts were of wives and children;/and secret friends who knew him well,/thoughts that he will share now only with himself.”

And we know her, don’t we? This woman of “soft pleas” who emerges from “a living room landscape of family photos and dusty Bibles.” She is the hearth keeper; albeit, possibly not the first one as “wives” is unmistakably plural. 

I love this poem because every time I read the last stanza, I have to ask myself if I am obligated to care more about this man than the clearly ambivalent speaker. Altman writes,

            He was to die upon a rug he used to vacuum

            and had admired from a distance.

            Now moving toward a new life,

            less worldly than the one which at that instant he was leaving,

            but a new life, just the same.

We have to ask ourselves, what type of man (or woman, for that matter) sinks so comfortably into an “unexpected” death? Could it be one with “secret friends” suddenly offered a clean slate?  This negative capability allows the question to linger as long as we wish, as the dying man only “[moves] toward a new life” when we are ready.

More dramatic but equally compelling is the poem, “2:17 a.m.” Here, Altman carefully attends to setting, mood, and plot. We exist in both space and time, and the speaker uses the poem’s title and first line to create a sense of tension that does not dissipate even when the danger has passed.

Awakening to the sounds of destruction,

            the family presses one another to the hardwood

Unable to move or see or understand

            in one final act of unity they pray silently, hands touching.

Bullets fill the room, shattering photos and jewelry and bed posts

            While small children, life faceless rag dolls, curl beside their mother

Each family member pinned down like a spider beneath a jar

            waiting for the inevitable.

                                                Suddenly, things stop.

The crackling glass still rings as tires screech beyond shattered blinds.

            Quiet sobs fill the void

                        where gunfire had been.

The father sighs, his family safe, his home destroyed,

            His secrets so rudely revealed.

He peeks outside, in the dim light,

                   thinking only of how badly his grass needs cutting

                            and whether his house will ever be sold.

Here, the poem’s story is mirrored in its visual rhetoric. The first stanza consists of alternating but uniformly indented, end-stopped lines connoting order even in the midst of disaster.  It almost does not matter that a solitary line interrupts the terror in the night because the second stanza, with its craggy indents, betrays a father’s secret life.

While I personally find “Death in the Foyer” and “2:17 a.m.” two of the most intriguing poems in Altman’s first collection, this chapbook’s scope is far reaching.  He explores the lethal neutrality of animal instinct in the poems “Wake Up Call” and “Her Woods” in the same proportion as the will to live and love in “The Groom’s Mother Has Cancer.”

“Death in the Foyer” can be found on the Finishing Line Press website at https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/death-in-the-foyer-by-david-r-altman/.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer in the English department at Kennesaw State University. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative Writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Replublic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems. 

Interview with Anya Krugovoy Silver

In the Fall semester of 2016, I asked Jessica Wilson, the administrator for the Georgia Writers Association, if she could recommend a handful of new poetry books. Her kind and generous response included I watched you disappear, by Anya Krugovoy Silver, which won the Georgia Author of the Year Award (GAYA) in 2015. I soon began reading Silver’s 2016 publication, From Nothing and found myself suspended between the worlds of late 19^th and early 20^th century art and, at times, unfamiliar fairy tales. I suspect that what will keep me picking this book up again and again is that I’ve found a bit of my own true north in the poet’s reluctance to romanticize childhood in favor of celebrating the weft and twill of adulthood.

Speaking briefly of her journey, Dr.  Krugovoy Silver relates, “I was born in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania to a Russian/Ukrainian father and Swiss/German mother.  My father was a Russian professor and I learned my love of language from the multilingual and multicultural environment in which I was raised.  I grew up in a home that valued learning, creativity, and questions over material success. Literature and church were the two sacred poles of my childhood.  I started scribbling stories early, but as an adult, I’ve published three books of poetry, The Ninety-Third Name of God, I Watched You Disappear, and From Nothing. I have always wanted to be a teacher, and currently teach English literature at Mercer University.  I live in downtown Macon with my husband, who also teaches at Mercer, and my son.  I have been living with inflammatory breast cancer since 2004.”

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: At its core, this collection of poems is a quiet rebellion against the myth that innocence alone is able to shoulder and shrug off malevolence. These poems take the stance that naiveté (projected or clung to) has no place in womanhood with a capital “W.” Was this a deliberate message? 

Anya Krugovoy Silver: It wasn’t a conscious theme as I wrote individual poems, but I noticed the focus on sensuality, and a refusal to conflate innocence with goodness, appearing and reappearing as I put the manuscript together. That’s especially true in a poem like “St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, Lent.”  I have long resisted the Platonic binary between body and soul, and in that particular poem, I reject the neo-Platonist Paul’s assumption that sensual desire is sinful or opposed to holiness: “Not to live in the passions of the flesh--/how grim and arid the light we’re promised.” I like to call this collection of poems my “red book” because there are so many red images throughout it.  The color, for me, signifies vitality and energy, blood and life.  Although there are many poems about mortality in the book, I also wanted to make room for the fullness and lusciousness of lived, bodily experience.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Your newest collection, From Nothing, also includes several ekphrastic pieces based on art by early 20^th century painters such as Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Chagall, Klimt, and Toulouse-Lautrec which reflect this “bodily experience.” The paintings and corresponding poems explore our sensual natures.  How did these works of art come to serve as a springboard into the conversation about sensuality and what is your personal connection to this time period?

Anya Krugovoy Silver:  Expressionist painting and art from the turn of the last century in general happen to be among my favorite art.  I particularly like German painters like Modersohn-Becker, Nolde, Köllwitz, Werefkin.  Each of these painters, and the others you mentioned, sought to paint the human body in a non-romanticized way.  With the possible exception of Klimt, they painted ordinary people with ordinary bodies, and sometimes erotically (Chagall and Toulouse-Lautrec, especially).  Modersohn-Becker painted German farmers without turning them into symbols of “the land” or “good, honest people.”  She simply painted them as she saw them, including what she perceived to be their individual spirits.  I love Kollwitz’s famous quote that “The motifs I was able to select from this milieu (the workers' lives) offered me, in a simple and forthright way, what I discovered to be beautiful.” One of my goals in this book was to write about the body—the ill body, the sexual body—honestly, without making the body either grotesque or precious.  I wanted to always respect the body’s, even the dead body’s, integrity and dignity.  The Expressionists whom I admire the most do that, so they were models to me, in a way. They painted human beings neither heroically or fastidiously.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: These same long strokes and subtle countenances that favor insight rather than minutiae are inherent in your own work. For example, several impressions of your father appear in “The Christmas Hat,” “Wake,” “In the Sanatorium,” and “Partings.”  He is, at once, a beloved parent seeking refuge from his demons, a man who cannot articulate his own suffering, and one who only found peace in death.  Do you feel that this is more kinship or craft in regard to the Expressionist painters?  

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Wow—that’s very insightful. I had never thought of a biographical reason for my love of expressionist art, but I think you’re right.  My father and I loved each other very much, and he was very proud of my poetry.  At the same time, in hindsight I would say that he experienced PTSD from the murder of his father during the Stalinist purges and from other experiences in the Soviet Union and in exile during and after the Second World War  He would begin to tell me stories and then explode in rage at the memories of what he’d seen.  When I look at expressionist art, and its focus on the turbulence of the inner life, and about how much can’t be articulated or understood by others, I definitely see my father’s face.  There is a loneliness in the figures of that art that I think resides in many people.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Fairy tales are woven through From Nothing. One might think that they are close relatives, but in this case the speakers of these poems seem to admonish the mythological ‘happily ever after’ while conveying childhood memories that do not mollify young skepticism. In fact, the speaker in Snow White cautions against romanticizing death and recognizes her own early folly. What inspired you to use fairy tales to promote the conversation addressing innocence in this collection?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: Fairy tales were the first form of literature that I encountered in my life.  My parents had a big blue book of the Grimms’ fairy tales that they read to me as a child.  I’ve continued to be obsessed with fairy tales, as so many writers are, because beneath a seemingly obvious and predictable narrative, they can be analyzed in countless ways.  I believe that reading and thinking about fairy tales can help humans find their values and vocations, to reach into their own minds, and I read many of them allegorically.  For example, I read the story of Cinderella as a tale about how one can survive grief; the romance is incidental to the real purpose of the story. It’s true that fairy tales posit a generally benign universe; things almost always end up happily for the protagonists.  I want readers to question those happy endings.  Specifically, serious trauma can’t simply be overcome by meeting a prince with a castle.  Pain stays in one’s memory, in some form or another, forever. 

I was consciously writing against the dominant cultural mood that one should “get over” grief and “move on” from pain.  I can’t stand that superficial notion of healing, and it’s often used to bully people who have gone through cancer or some other kind of violence.  As someone who has lived with cancer, I reject pink ribbon “survivor” culture.  My fairy tale poems, like “Nettle Shirts,” “Maid Maleen” and “Snow White” each argues that the concept of “getting past” cancer is absurd and puts a huge burden on a sick person.  I think that idea could be applied to anyone who has suffered abuse, assault, or violence.

And finally, I see in some popular culture, especially music and social media, a glorification of dying “young and beautiful.”  That’s always prettier in songs than in real life.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Is your answer to a more genuine healing process found in the poem, “Four Prayers for Forgiveness”? Because it is here that the origins of wounds are pursued while shifting perspectives still allow pain its rightful place.

Anya Krugovoy Silver: “Four Prayers for Forgiveness” grew out of my Sufi meditation classes. I’m trying to forgive a lot in the poem:  cancer, my body, myself, God.  For me, life with chronic illness is best lived when one is able to find peace and joy in the present.  I realize that’s a cliché, and easier said than done, but for me, happiness is an active practice and choice.  It’s definitely not the emotion that comes most easily in the face of suffering; happiness is difficult.  So the forgiveness that I describe in the poem is a forgiveness of my cancer cells, which are only doing what they’re biologically programmed to do, and a forgiveness of my body for endangering me.  I attempt to look beyond illness, and I refuse to let cancer define my life.  I choose to be fully alive. The last lines “I am absorbed like a drop of water/into a bottle of perfume without a bottom./I open my eyes and all is golden” express how I want to live completely immersed in life.  That’s also one reason that I included several love poems in the book.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: Before we close, I’d like to discuss the book’s title poem, “from nothing” which is preceded by the lines, “I am re-begot / Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.” from Donne’s “A Nocturnal upon St. Lucy’s Day.” 

FROM NOTHING

                                    Again and again, from nothingness I’m born.

                                    Each death I witness makes me more my own.

                                                I imagine each excess line of mine erased,

                                                each muscle shredded, each bone sheared.

                                                   One day, my spine’s long spar will snap,

                                    ribs tumbling loose; my face will droop and drop.

                                    Then I’ll be re-begot – the air will shimmer

                                    and my molecules will vault, emerging free.

                                    From darkening days, the light will surge and flee.

The poem itself is absolutely void of sentiment or affect, thus setting the tone for the rest of the collection, while the slant rhyme and final true rhyme imply a belief in a sense of order. How has your own belief in “the order of things” transformed since your cancer diagnosis, and is this poem most reflective of that sense?

Anya Krugovoy Silver: When one’s life feels out of control because of illness or trauma, it’s helpful, in a therapeutic sense, to wrest order from circumstance.  Some people do that through religion; others conceptualize their lives as journeys, with illness as part of the meaning and self-actualization of their time on earth.  In my case, poetry enables me to take a chaotic experience and fix it on the page, to give it line lengths, images, and sounds and to do what I want with it.  I reestablish a sense of control by giving experiences the meaning that I want them to have, no matter how inchoate that meaning is. 

In “From Nothing,” and in my poetry in general, I am more and more drawn to internal rhyme, slant rhyme, and sound effects such as assonance and consonance, to emphasize a sense of order.  For example, I used the slant rhyme of “snap and drop” and the alliteration of “droop and drop” consciously.  I like Edna St. Vincent Millay’s assertion that “I will put Chaos into fourteen lines/And keep him there.” Ultimately, if there is any underlying order in the world, I don’t think that human beings are privy to it.  I discern no order whatsoever in the deaths of my friends, or in the daily tragedies and disasters of the world.  All humans can do is create our own individual structures with which to deal with the unknown.  That’s why poetry and art will always be essential to the experience of being human.

Anya Silver has published three books of poetry with the Louisiana State University Press.  She has been published in numerous journals and anthologies, most recently in Best American Poetry 2016 (Scribner) and The Turning Aside:  The Kingdom Book of Contemporary Christian Poetry (Poiema Poetry).  Her work has been featured in Ted Kooser’s column American Life in Poetry, on Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac, and as an Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day.  She is currently completing her fourth poetry manuscript.  She has taught for eighteen years at Mercer University.  She is also a metastatic breast cancer thriver.

 

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a Lecturer at Kennesaw State University in Kennesaw, Georgia.  She received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky, and her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

An Interview with Frank X Walker

Conscious Narratives: Exploring Historical Poetry with Frank X Walker

By JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp

I had the pleasure of being introduced to Frank X Walker, also a Spalding University MFA graduate (2003), while attending a panel discussion in 2009. I mentioned to Spalding faculty member Jeannie Thompson that I was currently interested in the persona poem for an alternative approach to my study of the life of Mary Jemison. Frank happened to be in the ballroom of the Brown Hotel that day, and Jeannie said, “Well let me introduce you to someone!” The result was a deep appreciation for not only his poetry collections, but the example he sets for us all regarding earnest research when representing the life of our heroes and heroines.

A founding member of the Affrilachian Poets, Frank X Walker is the editor of America! What's My Name? The "Other" Poets Unfurl the Flag (Wind Publications, 2007) and Eclipsing a Nappy New Millennium. He is the author of six poetry collections: Turn Me Loose: The Unghosting of Medgar Evers (University of Georgia Press, 2013); Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride (Old Cove Press, 2010); When Winter Come: the Ascension of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2008); Black Box (Old Cove Press, 2005); Buffalo Dance: the Journey of York (University Press of Kentucky, 2003), winner of the 35th Annual Lillian Smith Book Award; and Affrilachia (Old Cove Press, 2000).

A Kentucky Arts Council Al Smith Fellowship recipient, Walker's poems have been converted into stage productions by the University of Kentucky Theatre department and Northern Kentucky University's Theatre and Dance Department and widely anthologized in numerous collections; including Ecopoetry: A Contemporary American Anthology, Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, The Southern Poetry Anthology, Vol. III, Contemporary Appalachia, Spirit and Flame: An Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry and Role Call: A Generational Anthology of Social and Political Black Literature and Art.

He is the first Kentucky writer to be featured on NPR's This I Believe and has appeared on television in PBS's GED Connection Series, Writing: Getting Ideas on Paper, in In Performance At the Governor's Mansion and in Living the Story: The Civil Rights Movement in Kentucky. He contributed to Writing Our Stories: An Anti-Violence Creative Writing Program Curriculum Guide developed by the Alabama Writer's Forum and the Alabama Department of Youth Services. He co-produced a video documentary, Coal Black Voices: the History of the Affrilachian Poets, which received the Jesse Stuart Award presented by the Kentucky School Media Association, and produced a documentary exploring the effects of 9.11 on the arts community, KY2NYC: Art/life & 9.11. A multidisciplinary artist, Walker's visual art is in the private collections of Spike Lee and Bill and Camille Cosby.

Walker is a native of Danville, Ky., a graduate of the University of Kentucky, and completed an MFA in Writing at Spalding University. He has served as founder/Executive Director of the Bluegrass Black Arts Consortium, the Program Coordinator of the University of Kentucky's King Cultural Center and the Assistant Director of Purdue University's Black Cultural Center. The University of Kentucky and Transylvania University awarded Walker honorary Doctorates for his collective community work and artistic achievements. He is the recipient of the Thomas D. Clark Literary Award for Excellence, Actors Theatre's Keeper of the Chronicle Award and a Recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship in Poetry. He has held board positions for the Kentucky Humanities Council, Appalshop and the Kentucky Writers Coalition as well as a government appointment to Cabinet for Education, Arts & Humanities and the Committee on Gifted Education. He has served as vice president of the Kentucky Center for the Arts and the executive director of Kentucky's Governor's School for the Arts.

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp: I was introduced to your work in the fall of 2009 upon reading Buffalo Dance and When Winter Come. These historical poems travel through and beyond the scope of social justice in order to create the profound sense of empathy the reader feels for York. What happened in the very beginning of this journey that inspired you to explore this man’s story?

Frank X Walker: My initial journey with York and my initial interest in historically based persona poems began with the embarrassment of acknowledging my own ignorance. After attending a Chautauqua presentation given by Hasan Davis in the character of York, I tried to rationalize how it happened that I had never heard his name before, given his Kentucky connections, given my background in African American culture and history, given the fact that I was living in the same city and walking the same streets, and given his significance to the success of the expedition. I wasn't sure if the education system failed me or if had failed myself. I thought I was familiar with the Lewis & Clark story, but the more I learned about York and the other young men from Kentucky who participated and other important details regarding their interactions with Native peoples, the richer the story got.

LoVerde-Dropp: In the poem “Revisionist History,” York brings to light the omission of his own role in the journey in the lines,

            The truth seemed to stretch so

            that by and by I seem to disappear from they tongues

            as if I had never even been there

            as if my blackness never saved they hides.

            Them twist the tales an leave out my parts in it

            so much so, that directly I become Massa Clark’s boy, again

            just along to cook

            an carry.

Here the speaker offers at least part of the explanation. Now in regard to your discovery of the revised history of York’s role in the expedition, I’m wondering if you experienced similar serendipitous events that led you to begin researching the lives of Isaac Murphy and Medgar Evers.

Walker: It would not be a stretch to say something similar happened in each case. Part of my interest in all of them is admittedly what I perceive as erasure. In Murphy's case, the degree to which African Americans participated and in many cases dominated thoroughbred racing is so invisible that it rarely comes up, though it wasn't my motivation for pursuing his story. And Medgar Evers' invisibility in a larger discussion of the Civil Rights that is often condensed to something as simple as 'MLK had a dream and Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat' is equally unfortunate. 

LoVerde-Dropp: In When Winter Come, the sequel to Buffalo Dance, you begin including voices other than York’s to tell his story. These voices manifest in the form of The River; Watkuweis; Sacagawea; William Clark; York’s Nez Perce wife, his slave wife, stepmother (Rose), father (Ol’ York), hunting shirt, hatchet, and knife. You state in the prologue, Another Trek, that these voices “provide the emotional undercurrent” in this second book. Could you talk more about this?

Walker:   Buffalo Dance is told in one voice, York's. By the time I was ready to write the sequel I had traveled more extensively throughout the Northwest reading from the first York book and had enjoyed significant exchanges with Native American scholars and members of the Nez Perce tribe which gave me a chance to hear another side of the story. I believed the sequel could get closer to the truth and be more authentic if other missing voices had a chance to contribute. I also believed that adding female voices would humanize the narrative even more.  Those new voices were the emotional undercurrent I was referring to. I have seven sisters and was raised by women so I know from experience that women see the world differently than men. I wanted to add their acute, honest, insightful perspectives to what had always been offered as a counterweight to an overtly patriarchal and predominantly white superman mythos.

LoVerde-Dropp: Your third book of persona poems, Isaac Murphy: I Dedicate This Ride, emphasizes the fierce devotion within Murphy’s circle as much as it does his rise to fame. I am thinking specifically of the poems “Keeper of the Flame” and “Too Heavy,” which were attributed to his wife, Lucy. What were you able to borrow from your devotion to your own family in order to create voices so real?  

Walker: I feel confident in how I perceive human interaction especially between women and men. I'm old enough to have loved and lost enough times to have become wiser for it.  When I craft collections of persona poems, I'm building from source material gathered from memory, research and imagination. It’s the emotional currency that comes from a first person voice and the imagination that keeps it from just being another history text. I'm fortunate to have survived enough personal experiences to create the authenticity that I want my readers to experience.

LoVerde-Dropp:  You’ve now released your fourth book of historical poetry, The Unghosting of Medgar Evers – how has your approach to the persona poem evolved over the past decade?

Walker: My approach to building a narrative driven by persona poems or what I now refer to as Historical Poetry, has definitely evolved over the four collections. I think I can say with confidence that multiple voices, especially those voices in opposition, lend more authenticity to the narrative and create a greater sense of truth for the reader. I've learned that much of what we accept as history is often simply the point of view of the one individual who wrote it down. I've learned that there are great rewards in spending the time, money, and effort in the research. I'm a better human being having encountered these men, their families and their stories.

LoVerde-Dropp: What do you feel are the most important lost details about the life of Medgar Evers that Turn Me Loose has restored to public consciousness?

Walker: I would hope that Turn Me Loose helps push Medgar Evers' name back into the conversation about civil rights. I think more people know about the details of the tragedy of Emmett Till than know about Medgar's assassination and even fewer know how responsible Medgar was in bringing the Till case to trial. I hope the book corrects some of those injustices.

LoVerde-Dropp: I get a sense of this the most in the poem Arlington, which is written in the voice of Medgar Evers’ wife, Myrlie. Each tercet is like a note higher than the last as the poem, which withholds its only period until the very last line, thus resisting both closure and complicity. Arlingtonreveals the incongruity between the ceremony offered upon Evers’ death and the reality of the lack of acknowledgement that should have honored his life.   This poem also integrates craft on a larger scale than what your readers are used to seeing, and I am wondering if you chose the tercet for this extended metaphor for a particular reason.

  

Walker: The tercets in this poem are intended to extend the image of the triangularly folded flag directly onto the page. Additional efforts, which include contemporary forms like the contrapuntal and hinge poems that are used throughout the collection, allowed me to illuminate the juxtaposition of voices that are in dialogue throughout the collection. I really worked hard on raising the craft in this last collection to something worthy of the narrative, where in the past I had been more concerned with just getting the narrative right. It was important to me that there was as many rewards for the reader looking for poetry as there was for the reader looking for a history lesson in these pages.  

                       

                                    Arlington

During the flag ceremony

                        soldiers folded, creased, tucked,

                        smoothed, and folded again

                        with such precision and care,

                        I imagined they were wrapping

                        a body

                        a red, white, and blue

                        mummy

                        which they passed, and saluted

                        and honored so much so

                        everybody stopped looking

                        at the casket

                        by the time they placed that triangle

                        of husband in my arms,

                        they left no doubt

                        I was holding his future

                        and what we were burying

                        was only his past.

LoVerde-Dropp: The topic of social justice appears in your role of editor as well as writer. The August 2013 issue of Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture is themed “The Lost Ones” and cites “the wake of the Trayvon Martin/George Zimmerman case” as the inspiration for its title. In this regard, you have a voice, unlike writers with compartmentalized public and private personas, that is steady and consistent. What can you tell us about how this carries over into the classroom when you are teaching in a University?

Walker: I don't try to hide the fact that I see myself as an artist/activist and teacher actively engaged in the world around me. I encourage my students to tune into what's happening in their own worlds and to consider what they are or can be emotionally invested in and to use that emotion as a starting point or an emotional center for their own work. I also use some of my own work in the classroom. When the students can make the connection between the writer and the work and have access to the entire backstory, they really understand the writing process, especially how authentic emotion vs. sentimentality can impact a piece of writing.

LoVerde-Dropp: Could you talk a little bit more about this – teaching the difference between authentic emotion vs. sentimentality – as it applies to creating a more three dimensional backdrop, especially in Historical Poetry?

Walker: Many students mistakenly initially believe that receiving an emotional reaction from an audience after sharing the details of a tragic event makes it a good piece of writing, which could spiral a peer workshop away from craft and into a tragedy contest. This evokes a kind of sentimentality that has more to do with the subject and less to do with the quality of the writing. When they fully understand the historical context, the motivation of the speaker, the possible emotional state during that poem as it relates to the other poems and other variables in a series that portrays the subject as a multi-dimensional character it is truly instructive.

LoVerde-Dropp: You also write in other genres besides poetry, and you are currently working towards finishing a fiction novel.  What was it that prompted you to explore the lives and circumstances of these men and women in the form of historical poetry as opposed to the biography?  

Walker: I like the under-the-skin-closeness of poetry. I like getting so deep inside a character's head and heart that you start to imaging what they dream about. That would be breaking the rules in a biography. You're not supposed to take those kinds of poetic licenses. And I also love the fact that a small collection of poetry, can take you as close or even closer to a subject as a thick biography or book of history.

LoVerde-Dropp: You noted that African American poets Kevin Young, Natasha Trethaway, Tyhimba Jess, Marilyn Nelson, and Adrian Matejah, among others, have also contributed to the genre and that an effort is being made to convince libraries, bookstores and publishers that Historical Poetry deserves its own shelf space. What exactly is it about Historical Poetry that draws you in so closely?

Walker: I think I’m drawn to the fact that the poetry is doing more than what most people expect of poetry, that it is misbehaving, that it has taken on a level of activism that allows it to break new ground and is creating new poetry fans.

LoVerde-Dropp: You’ve stated, “I feel that the research and character studies necessary to building the authentic narratives in the historical poetries made for an easier transition back into fiction.”  This brings me back to your current fiction project; what can you tell me about its inception and storyline?

Walker: This novel project comes out of a group of stories I've been carrying around with me for a long time. The one I'm focusing on in the current manuscript is probably closest to the life I've lived these fifty plus years but is still fiction. It’s a coming of age tale and an exploration of black masculinity that centers on a father and son separated at birth, both of whom become writers. After a secret interracial relationship results in an unplanned pregnancy in a state institution in rural Kentucky, the father is charged with rape and sentenced to twenty years in prison and the mother is transferred to a home for unwed mothers where she is forced to give her son up for adoption.  The story really begins when the father and son's lives cross for the first time twenty years later via an exchange of letters just before the father's release from prison. As much as I enjoy the craft of poetry I must admit that I've been excited about having a project that has allowed me to bring these characters to life on the page and to take everything I've learned about writing and things I've experienced in the real world and repurposing it all in an imaginary space on a much bigger screen.

Frank X Walker has taught in writing programs like Fishtrap in Oregon and SplitRock at the University of Minnesota and currently serves as Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Kentucky where he serves as the founding editor of PLUCK!, the Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture. 

Photo by Rachel Eliza Griffiths

JoAnn LoVerde-Dropp is a full-time instructor at Southern Polytechnic State University in Marietta, Georgia and serves as Secretary on the board of directors for the Georgia Writers Association. Her article, “Accessible Poetry” appears monthly on the Georgia Writers website http://www.georgiawriters.org/. JoAnn received her MFA in Creative writing from Spalding University in Louisville, Kentucky. Her poetry has appeared in Gargoyle Magazine, Public.Republic.net, and Bigger than They Appear: Anthology of Short Poems.

               Photo by Noah Dropp