Interview with Ariel Francisco

...the hurricane somewhere out

in the Atlantic, spinning itself into nothingness,

dissipating under its own destructive power.

     — from “Post Hurricane Miami,”   
Ariel Francisco

The above photo and the following bio were found on the poet's website: 
https://arielfranciscopoetry.wordpress.com

Ariel Francisco is the author of All My Heroes Are Broke(C&R Press, 2017) and Before Snowfall, After Rain (Glass Poetry Press, 2016). Born in the Bronx to Dominican and Guatemalan parents, he was raised in Miami and completed his MFA at Florida International University.

Ariel Francisco is a first generation American poet of Dominican and Guatemalan descent. He is currently completing his MFA at Florida International University where he is the editor-in-chief of Gulf Stream Literary Magazine and also the winner of an Academy of American Poets Prize. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Gulf Coast, Tupelo Quarterly, Washington Square, and elsewhere.

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I've never met Ariel Francisco. When poet friend, Kate Fadick's chapbook, Self-Portrait as Hildegard of Bingen, became available for preorder from Glass Poetry Press, I learned that Editor Anthony Frame was offering a purchase deal on all the chapbooks he would publish in the first series, so I subscribed, and discovered Francisco's poetry in that series. —Karen L. George

You can read a review of Ariel Francisco book Before Snowfall, After Rain here. 

(This interview was conducted via email.)

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One of the qualities I especially enjoy about chapbooks vs. poetry collections is that chapbooks, especially one as exquisite as yours, are so effective in creating a cohesive work, a concentration that resonates in each poem and in the poems as a whole. Every time I read your chapbook, I notice more connections or threads woven through it by the use of repeated imagery and themes that deepen and illuminate your work. What do you like and/or dislike about this short poetry form?  

AF:  That’s actually really interesting because I was working on my thesis (which turned into my forthcoming full length collection, All My Heroes Are Broke) when I was approached about publishing a chapbook. I had another project I was working on which was about chapbook length, but ultimately decided to construct something from the poems in my thesis instead. So while I didn’t write it as a chapbook, or with a chapbook in mind, I had a lot to work with which presented ample opportunities to create connects and threads throughout. It was difficult but also a lot of fun, essentially paring 60 pages of poems down to 20, and then trying to figure out an order. I think I decided on the title first, for example, so that set the opening poem and closing poem in place, and I just worked my way inwards from there.

What I love about chapbooks is their ability to create and sustain these threads throughout the poems, whatever they may be. I don’t want to say it’s easier to do in chapbook than a full length book because I don’t want to diminish it, but it does make more sense to do that in a smaller space. I think that’s part of the reason why chapbooks are becoming more popular. It’s a slightly different medium where one can accomplish something different, and there are a lot of talented poets out there publishing very cool, very strange, and very beautiful chapbooks.

 In your poems you mention the poets Baudelaire, Bukowski, Lorca, and James Wright. Are these some of your favorite poets, or ones that particularly influenced you, and if so, can you tell us what you particularly admire about them? Or if these are not favorite poets of yours, what are some of your favorite or most influential poets, and why?

AF:  They’re poets that I’ve read pretty well at different points in my life. Of those, James Wright has had the biggest influence on me, even for the style of these kinds of poems— engaging with them directly instead of just writing a poem in their style, or after them, which seems more common. I’m thinking, for example, of Wright’s “As I Step Over A Puddle At The End Of Winter, I Think Of An Ancient Chinese Governor,” which alludes to Po Chu-I (another poet I really love). I also got this from Campbell McGrath, one of my teachers and mentors, who is always bringing in poets of the past into in his own poems whether it's James Wright or Richard Hugo or Emily Dickinson or Frank O’Hara. I think seeing it in his work sort of gave me permission to do it in my own, and it’s a lot of fun. Not to mention it gave me more poets to look up and read when I was younger. Reading Campbell’s “James Wright, Richard Hugo, the Vanishing Forests of the Pacific Northwest” was the first time I had heard of those two poets, for example.

Also, a lot of it is just true, and I often use that as a jumping off point for poems. Where it takes me is another story but I did find that Baudelaire book and mail it to someone that never got it, and I was reading James Wright on the L when that dude started throwing up on himself.

What drew you to poetry?  What inspires you to write poetry?

AF:  I didn’t start writing poetry until I started college. I’d been reading incessantly since I learned how to read, though I never read poetry until my senior year of high school. In AP English, I remember hatingT.S. Eliot but really enjoying Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath and that was pretty much it. Going into college, I knew that being just a reader wasn’t a real thing, so I figured writing was the logical progression. Though I’d mostly read fiction and novels, I had no interest in writing it, at all. It seemed strange at the time, but I found absolutely no correlation between reading fiction and wanting to write it, whereas reading even just that little bit of poetry (most of it being The Waste Land, which again, I hated) seemed to just make more sense to me, I think because it struck me more as a sense-making endeavor. I could obviously understand why people read novels but I couldn’t fathom why someone would want to write one, whereas poetry right away made sense from both angles.

I remember before taking an Intro to Creative Writing course in my first semester of college, I went to Barnes and Noble to check out the poetry section (I guess even then, I knew I had to read more poetry in order to ever get good at it) to see if I could something that would interest me. First, I found Emily Dickinson’s collected poems (the affordable B&C classics version, which I still love). Then, in a moment of befuddlement and sheer job, I found Plath’s Arielwhich I had no idea existed. Imagining thinking “I’ll give this poetry thing a try” and then finding your own name on a book by one of only three poets you’ve read. I took this as a good omen and signed up for a workshop almost every semester in undergrad, and just kept writing, which was great because I had failed chemistry and college algebra in my first semester, and switched my major from Marine Biology to English (long story).

What inspires me to write poetry is just the desire to make sense of my life, which I think is the source of a lot of art. It’s as reflective and analytical as it is creative for me, so when I get it right I feel like I have created something and solved something else.

 

 I wanted to ask you about the poem “Perhaps it Wasn’t Such a Perfect Day for Bananafish.” Salinger’s story that is referenced in the epigraph is so haunting, and I found your poem haunting as well. The ending image stuck with me, of the “I” of the poem searching the hotel windows, “ears perked / for the sound of a muffled gunshot.” But I was equally struck by the image near the center of the poem, where, after seeing this man at the beach who “stands in the foam staring at his feet, / hiding his toes in the cold froth,” you say, “I lay Salinger’s / ‘Nine Stories’ in the bird-pocked sand.” The poem doesn’t spell out what the story of the man standing in the ocean might be, or of the other person in the poem who is reading Salinger’s “Nine Stories.” Yet they’re connected by being in the same place at this exact moment. And by how the man standing in the ocean suggests the male character in Salinger’s story, “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” which is a story in the collection “Nine Stories.” The “muffled gunshot” in the poem also echoes the ending of Salinger’s story, where the troubled man leaves the beach, goes into his hotel room and shoots himself.

But I’m curious about why the “I” of the poem lays the story collection “in the bird-pocked sand.” We don’t know if he lays it there temporarily, or is, as it were “done” with the book, himself haunted by the story. I had the curious idea that maybe the “reader” I’ll call him/her, thinks this man on the beach is troubled in some way, and that maybe this book of stories is just what he might need. I’m curious what you meant to suggest by his laying of the book in the sand. It’s such an evocative image, as is the effect of the scene of this beach mirroring the scene in Salinger’s story.

AF:  This is a really great question and I feel bad that I can’t give a very long answer to it. On the one hand, I think he’s putting the book down to reflect. Given the setting of the story, I think he is perhaps imagining that he is on the very same beach that Seymour killed himself on and is maybe revisiting the story in his head, imposing it on his current surroundings. I think he sees the man hiding his toes in the water, that’s for the reader (also hopefully reminiscent of Seymour accusing the woman in the elevator of staring at his toes). I like the idea of the reader thinking the book might help this troubled man but the “I” is too lost in thought to notice him, unfortunately.

In your 2014 “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine” interview with Tony Hoagland, he says at one point in the conversation, “Poems are like clues that have been left for us along the road, little packages that have been left which anybody might find.  You might read a poem, like I did, by W.S. Merwin, many years ago and say, ‘this man knows what I’ve been looking for, and he’s saying what I’ve been waiting for somebody to tell me.’ Our contemporary poems have the obligation to do that too.”

Do you agree with Hoagland’s idea, and what do you envision or hope your poems tell its readers?

AF:  Oh yeah, I definitely agree with Tony there. I mean, I think that’s just a fun way of explaining why we love poems so much. When you read a poem that really resonates with you, it truly does feel as though the poet has some kind of secret insight into your life. How could they know this is exactly how I feel? Right? But it also acknowledges the extreme subjectability of poetry. There could a poem out there that everyone is raving about, but you don’t find it to be particularly good or interesting or resonant. It could be that that poem is not a clue for you.

What I hope for my poems, in the hands and eyes of readers, is to create a space or atmosphere for the mind to occupy. I think of them as tiny episodes of a very weird show— the episodes cumulate not necessarily into a cohesive story but into a larger space. I’m not sure if that makes sense but I hope people keep watching.

 

I read that you are the editor-in-chief of “Gulf Stream Literary Magazine,” and a reader for “The Indianola Review.” What are some of the elements you look for in submissions, that make a poem memorable for you?

AF:  Speaking broadly, my favorite kinds of poems are those that seem to communicate a genuine human experience. It doesn’t necessarily have to be something true. I know the speaker or the “I” in a poem isn’t always the poet, but I want to believe or be convinced that it is. I want to believe that when reading a poem, the person speaking to me is an actual person telling me something that’s very important to them. Why is this thing important? Maybe I’m not sure, but if I believe that it is, I will reread it for reasons.

What poets and/or collections are you currently reading, and can you tell us what you particularly like about them?

 AF:  Oh, too many to name! I’ve been revisiting Phil Levine, though mostly his collected interviews and essays and various prose things. His work occupies a real world that I recognize very well (the working class struggle, etc.), so I’m always coming back to him in some way or another. Similarly, Adrian Matejka’s new “Map of the Stars” is a book I’ve been really loving this summer. He seems to dip into memory a lot in this book with poems about childhood, whether it’s wonder and curiosity (I too was obsessed with space as a kid) or the struggles of growing up poor, of feeling out of place in the place you call home. That’s always going to resonate with me.

  

I understand you have a forthcoming poetry collection called “All My Heroes Are Broke” that can be pre-ordered now, and released by C&R Press in September.  Congratulations! Can you tell us a little about this new book?

AF:  The book has epigraph from the rap group Atmosphere, which I think sums it up pretty well: “I ain’t saying that you never had to struggle for a buck or some luck or some love, motherfucker join the club.” The poems are essentially about a life in search of these three things (hence being broke, in more than one sense), not necessarily finding them, and not necessarily giving up. Briefly, it’s about being a first generation American and finding that everything kinda sucks.

Do you have anynew projects you are currently at work on?

AF:  I’m grinding away at my second book, and I have poems towards a third and a fourth (they don’t make sense together). I’m translating some of my dad's poems into English, which is a really interesting experience. I’m also maybe working on a chapbook of poems inspired by Cowboy Bebop. And, of course, I am looking for a job.

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You can read several of Ariel Francisco's poems below:

            “Reading James Wright on the L Train”in Duende

            “Nighthawks of the 24-Hour Donut Shops” in Tinderbox Poetry Journal

            “Post Hurricane, Miami” & “Silence Over the Snowy Fields” in The Boiler Journal

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Karen George retired from computer programming to write full-time. She lives in Florence, Kentucky, and enjoys photography and traveling to historic river towns, mountains, and Europe. She is author of the poetry collection Swim Your Way Back(Dos Madres Press, 2014), and five chapbooks, most recently Into the Fire (Blue Lyra Press, 2016) and the collaborative  Frame and Mount the Sky  (Finishing Line Press, 2017). You can find her work in Rogue Agent, Blue Fifth Review, Heron Tree, The Ekphrastic Review, and America. She holds an MFA from Spalding University, and is co-founder and fiction editor of the journal, Waypoints. Visit her website: http://karenlgeorge.snack.ws/. 

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 Dave Harrity, Author of Our Father in the Year of the Wolf

Dave Harrity

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf
www.daveharrity.net

WordFarm
www.wordfarm.net

ISBN: 978-1-60226-016-0

Click here to read an excerpt of the book.

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Dave Harrity was one of the first people I met when my family moved to Louisville, KY in the late 90s. We were both going into our freshman year of high school. I was still struggling to adjust to life in America after living overseas for most of the past 10 years, and Dave was a boisterous New Jersey transplant, already established and well-connected.

If I had to pick one person who I thought would become a respectable poet in my class, Dave wouldn’t have been my first choice. I knew him OK. We attended the same youth group on Sundays and hung out every once in a while. He was the guy most likely to swallow a lead fishing sinker, accidentally tip a canoe in ice cold water, or randomly inject “randy” into conversation, even in Geometry where a flustered “Madame Fro-bush” often failed to control the class.

But now that I think of it, there was the one time he conned some of us into going to a poetry reading we thought was going to be a killer ska show, and it probably would have been if the lead singers were singing instead of reading their poetry. Maybe it was an honest mistake. Maybe not. I didn’t realize Dave was a poet until after I had moved back to the area and looked him up on Facebook. He had a chapbook out, and had graduated from Spalding University’s Brief Residency MFA program, a program I’d later complete myself. I soon discovered that not only did he write poetry, but he was writing pretty good poetry.

Fast forward to today. Dave has had success with his book Making Manifest, teaches at Campbellsville University, and has played an important role in the formation of The Association for Theopoetics Research and Exploration and serves as creative editor for its associated journal, Theopoetics: A Journal of Theological Imagination, Literature, Embodiment, and Aesthetics. His two latest books are These Intricacies and Our Father in the Year of the Wolf.

Our Father in the Year of the Wolf is the type of book that helps bolster a poet’s reputation. Although the poems will often challenge the reader, the subtle but pervasive music is a strong enough engine to keep most readers engaged. Harrity's lines are often long, but pleasantly long the way Whitman’s lines are long. Lines that span the entire width of the page often fall naturally into pleasant "breaths."

The music of the poems serves as an ordering mechanism. Even when the poems are thematically dense, the music encourages the reader to trust the poet and to return to the poems again and find each time a richer experience. But even when it is difficult to process the poems intellectually, the book makes profound emotional sense. This is a great testament to Harrity's skill as a poet.

Dave took a little time out of his busy schedule to answer some questions by email.

First of all, congrats for releasing not one but two books of poetry in the past year or so. If you were to tell me in high school that you were going to be a poet, I don’t know that I would have believed you. So how did you come to be a poet? 

First, thank you for asking me to do this—I’m honored and full of gratitude! As for your question: Hah! I was a poet in high school, but I was quiet about it. No one knew except one of our classmates. I wrote her poems to try to get her to date me, and it worked for a while. She liked poems. The relationship didn’t last, but I kept writing. And just never stopped really. I became a poet by doing, not by reading. That’s important for me. I’ve since developed a habit of study, but it came after the fixation I had with creating.

We are both graduates of Spalding University’s MFA program. I can understand some of the criticism MFAs receive, but my experience at Spalding was overwhelmingly positive. Briefly, what influence has your MFA had on your literary career? 

I had a good experience at Spalding as well, and I think that had to do with the literary community it provided for me. It was a place where I didn’t have to explain myself—I could have this strange, shared artistic fixation; I could ask questions to friends and read and write alongside them. The MFA taught me how to demand meaningful interactions with other artists. I worked so hard in that program—took full advantage of my profs and peers. The MFA helped me understand how important it is to have literary and creative relationships—I still have some very close relationships from Spalding.

Of your two most recent books, These Intricacies seems more contemplative and accessible, while Our Father is denser, darker, and more experimental. Did you write these books with a specific purpose in mind or was their creation more organic in their development? 

They both sort of materialized as their own projects. Most of the poems in both books were written post-MFA. I was writing all the poems at the same time though, since about 2007. The poems in TI are certainly older, and an editor approached me about making a book. At the time, I had a manuscript. He looked at it and asked me to send as many other poems as I could. We worked from there to make the book.

Our Father was always conceived as a book-length project. I kept writing the strange poems and just piled them all in a folder. After about four years of this, I pulled the folder out and began stitching them together.

When reading Our Father for the first time, I was struck by its remarkable depth, and I feel like I have a richer experience each time I revisit the book. It’s exquisitely woven, whether it’s the thematic movement from poem to poem, illustrations of the moon passing through different phases, or the interaction of poem titles. What was your revision process like for this book? Did you focus more on the individual poems or the work as a whole? 

Thanks for saying that—man. That’s a really wonderful compliment and I’m glad it worked that way for you. I hope the same for all who read it! Originally, the manuscript was over a hundred pages. Which was crazy. I cut it down to sixty pages. Lots and lots and lots of cutting—ruthless. I tried to trust what the poems were trying to be, which was unfamiliar at first. But as the process moved forward, I began working in this strange, long tercet, and the voice in the poems began to ring clearer. The form really helped to order the book, which had never happened to me before. It was an uneasy delight the whole way.

You mention hagiography in the author’s notes. Could you briefly explain what that is and maybe give an example of the role it plays in this collection? 

Yeah… that idea—the narratives of the lives of saints—has always captivated me. The lives of early martyrs in the Christian tradition, especially. The stories are so fanciful and bizarre—they’ve always seemed to be the most interesting secrets of the Christian Church, though similar styles or narrative abound in other faith traditions.

In Our Father, there is this cursed family—focused mainly on the father and son. I read a story about St. Natalis of Ireland who cursed the Meath Clan when they wouldn’t repent from their evil. He cursed them to be werewolves. I just found the whole story captivating and thought I could use it, quite loosely, as the basis of the book since monsters/beasts—wolves, in particular—were dominating the metaphorical structure of the book.

In Making Manifest you argue for writing as spiritual practice. Our Father is full of biblical allusions and influence from other religious sources, but the book seems to embrace mystery and acknowledge nuance rather than evangelize or provide Sunday school answers. How is Our Father a reflection of your theology? 

Oh dear… I’m going to have to speak generally, and you’ll have to forgive me for it. I feel so estranged in/from discussions of faith and art. In my travels and teaching I’ve learned most believing people don’t want art, especially if it seems contrary to whatever they’re bred to believe, or—at the very least—art isn’t a priority of the faith experience for the majority of religious folks.

Sure, there are people who are serious about their faith and their art—I know many such people deeply, and I’m not talking about them here—but art seems to be largely dumbfounding to “the faithful” unless it does evangelize or affirm what’s learned in Sunday School. Whatever that nonsensical conglomeration of creative things is, I can’t usually name it as art or artfully made. On top of that, making art is an act of existence, of living into one’s embodiedness—one’s humanness—and there are more than a few people in the pews that think that existing as one is is sinful.

I told a student recently—he writes poems—that if he wants to be an artist and is a person of faith that he should bury that faith so deep into his poems that no one but someone just like him will know it’s there. If you ask me, all things worthwhile sing to one another from the depth. I also told him not to trust people who claim faithfulness but have no creative life.

Generally speaking: it’s usually dangerous or unfair to discern a person’s theology through a person’s art, I think. And the acts of mixing theology and art—with some fantastic exceptions—are often irrelevant disasters that suffer from didacticism and are blind to how extraneous, inappropriate, or just plain silly they are. My work has been there. That said, there are so many brilliant artists of faith that get little attention outside of literary circles—God, so many brilliant ones. And that’s a sin—that their voices aren’t known. As for Our Father and me, I don’t know if it reflects a theology, much less my own.

You experiment with longer lines in many of these poems, which can be dangerous when paired with the kind of weighty subject material and dense language you use in this book, but your lines have a natural “breath” to them that allows the reader to process them in small chunks. You also experiment with space and breaks within the line in a way that pays respect to form and tradition, but is fresh and contemporary. Could you talk about the role form played in developing these poems? 

As I said before, the long tercet became the book’s fingerprint. With lines like that, however, I had to really work to understand the caesura, which is something that alluded me until this book. Also, in this book, I worked to master metrical structures, which are important to me as a poet, and have always been important to my work. I think I gained some ground, but what I love about poems is that I will spend the rest of my life working on sounds.

How do you approach titling poems? You do it so well. “If the Silver Could be Given Back & Prophecies Erased” is a brilliant title, and the titles as a whole in this book carry a lot of weight and significance.

That’s a really tough question—in this book I tried to embody the poem with some kind of Scriptural, historical, or philosophical referent. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

As a parent to two kids under the age of 4, I struggle to get a lot of writing done. You have two kids, a wife, a job, and a literary career. How do you find time to write and be a part of the literary community? 

You don’t find it, you make it. If my writing doesn’t get done, I’m the only thing that forced it not to happen. Make time. No one else is going to do it for you. But if you’re lucky and smart you will surround yourself with people who remind you of what you should do and help you do it. And don’t forget to play with your kids every day.

Lastly, what projects do you have on the horizon that we should be watching for?

Right now all I’m doing is working on a poem every day and playing blues guitar. I don’t think anyone will be hearing much creatively from me any time soon. But if you see me, say hello!