“Your poems cast light upon things that often go unseen. I think this is what the best poems do.”
– Alison Swan
I LIKE TO DWELL IN THE OBVIOUS
An Interview with Keith Taylor by Alison Swan
2023-2024
On October 11, 2023, Keith Taylor and I settled into his beloved study, overlooking his and his wife Christine Golus’s rewilded backyard on the west side of Ann Arbor, and began the first of two conversations about his poetry. He has two new books out this year (2024)—All the Time You Want (Dzanc Books) and What Can the Matter Be? (Wayne State University Press) and when I asked him what he thought about looking back over the last five, plus decades, he said, thankfully, yes.
Thirty-some years ago, I lived in the house next door so I know how thoroughly the yard has been transformed. Christine—they’ve been together since 1977—is a plant whisperer and their gardens are full of native plants and the creatures that need them. Keith is a lifelong birder and if you ever get a chance to ask him what he’s seen in his own backyard, do. Let us call the place healed and say thanks.
Keith settles into his gray easy chair, the one where a great deal of his book life gets lived—now that he’s retired from the University of Michigan. And I, rather than sit in the proffered rocking chair from which my feet would not touch the ground, make myself comfortable on the newly re-carpeted floor. Keith tells me it won’t off-gas. It’s wool.
I have a view of the tops of some oaks I used to watch as I wrote from the lower flat next door, of Keith’s twenty-four William Carlos Williams books (by or about)—just one small portion of his enormous poetry book collection, and of a framed copy of the poem he wrote for his father on the occasion of his 80th birthday—the only copy that exists he tells me later. It’s the study and house and yard of a person who chose his home place a long time ago.
– Alison Swan, October 4, 2024
Alison: Okay, warmup. Dogs or cats?
Keith: Oh, definitely cats. Dogs are just too damn needy. [We were tickled to see that the software that translated this audio interview—and which ended up being useless—had changed dogs to Gods.]
Winter, spring, summer, or fall?
I do want to say, all. I probably have more poems about fall and winter. Then would come spring. Summer would be last
Night or day?
I think I was probably night up until I was 50. Now I’m day. I had a teacher in England who said he could tell whether a young poet wrote a poem in the night or the day. I sort of see his point, although I've never said that in front of students.
Favorite place to read.
This chair by this window. What Can the Matter Be? was basically written right here. This was my COVID spot.
Favorite place to give a reading
Well, I have lost my taste for giving readings. The most exciting place I ever read was Carnegie Hall. It was very cool to stand there and look out at that whole audience, with an orchestra behind me.
My favorite place to give a reading would be an intimate space with friends. But I've gotten so weepy. At Walter and Ava Butzu’s house, a while ago, they had just stumbled across Jamaal May’s poem, “There Are Birds Here,” for Detroit, and asked me to read it. And I was just sobbing.
Is that why you don't so much like to give readings now?
Yeah. Little poems, like that one right there for my dad. [He gestures to the poem, propped on a little table.] I wrote that for his 80th birthday, which was in 2000. I've never published it anywhere. When he died, that framed original came back to us. Reading it makes me cry.
I feel like you should read it-—for posterity.
[laughs] Okay, I probably won't cry here.
My Father’s Eightieth Birthday
How does it happen? Like sun
on a day of rain . . . a quick
change of seasons: unexpected
crocuses breaking the crust
of snow . . . chinook lines racing
east above the cold prairie,
changing something . . . my father
softly, gracefully ages.
That’s beautiful.
You went through chinook country on your road trip west. Montana and Alberta have chinooks. And really no place else.
The chinook winds bring warm weather over the mountains and then come down in this line. I think you have to be east of the mountains.
It’s a native name. And I'm not sure where it comes from. But Calgary, Alberta, will go from twenty below to thirty above in eight hours, fifty-degree temperature difference.
Superior, Michigan, Huron, Erie, or Ontario?
Definitely Superior, because it's the wildest. It has that forest on the north shore and even some of it on the south shore and it has rocky coastlines. On the northeast shore, you find two-hundred-foot granite cliffs falling straight into the lake. After that, Michigan, because Michigan is so damn picturesque. I’m also very fond of Erie.
Interestingly, there are very few state-designated natural areas along Lake Michigan, while Huron has many. I have theories about why this is. The official reason is: the state ran out of funding.
Lake Huron’s interesting, too—as you know there was a time when people working on the line could afford houses on the lake there.
The topography [along the western/US shore of Lake Huron] lends itself to little houses right next to each other and also close to the water, at least most of the way.Yeah.
I spent a fair amount of time on the Huron shore in the last 15 years or so, when I was working at the U of M Biological Station, which is equidistant [to both lakes].
Favorite place to discover a writer you didn't already know about?
Other than right here in this chair by this window? During all my years as a bookseller, I discovered these people in bookstores, and they’re still my favorite place to. I often discover writers online now. Facebook, Lit Hub….
Poem-a-Day [Academy of American Poets]?
Poem a Day, yeah. Paris Review has a poem a day, called something else [Daily Poem], all poems from their archives. That's pretty interesting. They go way back into the ‘50s as well as to just last year. So sometimes Paris Review sends out a poem by someone you haven’t heard about. You look them up. Nothing, except in that 1957 Paris Review. They would have thought they were on their way—a poem in the Paris Review
Right.
Friends still tell me to read people. And I still read them. You tell me to read somebody, I’ll read them.
When I go in a bookstore that I hardly ever go into, like Snowbound Books in Marquette, I look for a book of poems to buy. I might see something that I wouldn't otherwise see. Or just to support the bookstore.
I do the same thing.
This [An Incomplete Encyclopedia of Happiness and Unhappiness by Amy Newman] was highly recommended by a staff member at Snowbound. I'm liking it.
That's nice. Persea Books, that's a big publisher. I wonder how they got it at Snowbound Books. And it's her fifth book? Nice title.
Yeah, that's what I thought: Why didn't I think of that? [Keith laughs] I feel the same way about your title--
Marginalia for a Natural History
Yes. The Bird-while is pretty wonderful too.
And that's ended up having a life. People don't even know it's me rescuing a phrase from Emerson. Other people, Terry Blackhawk and a couple of others, have written poems called “Bird-while.”
How come nobody's done anything, till now?
Emerson's journals are long and boring and that one little passage is just tiny.
My friend Pete Becker, who's dead now, was a complete Emerson nut. We were canoeing in northern Ontario. I remember him saying, “Did you ever run across Emerson's idea of the bird-while?” And I hadn't. "The length of time a bird will let us look at it.” He found the passage and gave it to me. I acknowledge him.
I admire the way you learn from people. The Biological Station has played an important role hasn’t it?
In “The Bird-while,” I made a conscious effort, with dedications to poems or in the acknowledgments—you and David are in the end of it—to name people who have been important to me. I mention almost one hundred people in the book, more than half in the acknowledgments.
It’s flattering, of course, to be included—but it's also just interesting because while it’s true you don't really write a lot of poems about people, people are very present in your books.
People know things that I don't know, particularly all those scientists at the Biological Station. I always feel I have to give that acknowledgement. You'll notice in the Selected Poems there's a lot less of that. But you’re right, not a lot of people in the poems and less and less personal data. Or data only comes from personal observation. [Stephen] Leggett and I talk about this a lot. Because he really dislikes the poems that have the unnecessary “I.” I think the “I” is weird.
I recently read a wonderful book by a poet of the generation younger than mine, which is about his split with the mother of his child. I don't know the poet well, but we've enjoyed each other’s company a few times. And I've known his ex since she was a little girl. The poet sort of makes it feel as if he's the struggling, single father, but I’m not sure that’s the same perception from the other side. He’s written a very good book of poems. So I was thinking that poetry might be special pleading. Is that any different than Sappho getting pissed off at her lover because her lover has a boyfriend? Is that any different than Shakespeare sonnets? Poets use the lyric poem to tell their side of the story.
Sylvia Plath is a great example of that, right?
Yeah. Ted Hughes too.
I was struck by a question Steve Gillis asked you.
He’s afraid of very little, Steve.
[Reading from Steve Gillis’s interview of Keith] “Is it not the job of the poet to convey at once an impassioned and yet objective observation of what is being written about and in that way convey a sense of truth.”
What did I say?
It’s just perfect. [Reading] “I'm not sure I've ever known what the job of a poet is. [Both laugh.] My life would probably be easier if I did.” But you know, I don't get the sense that you are trying to affect the world or change things or preach.
I definitely don't do that. It's partly because my dad was a preacher. I genuinely believe that by finding beauty and trying to articulate beauty in whatever words are given to us that we can have an influence. There’s a prose piece in my new book [What Can the Matter Be], called “On Beauty, Jackboots, and the Rain,” about sitting in a cabin at the Bio Station while the Charlottesville stuff was going on. If I allow the jackboots to distract me from the beauty then they have won. Many people could see this as frivolous or escapism. I can live with that.
You certainly want to tell the truth and you don't want to think that truth is subjective, but I am going to write about the truth as I see it.
Talk about what you’re writing now.
Well, I just put these two books together and that takes a lot of time. Then suddenly, I had like seven new poems in the last month, which is incredible. They are really short, but they're about things like the luna moths.
Or the one time I beat the cedar waxwings to the Saskatoon berries—serviceberries—out here… And one about witch hazel because it blooms in November. So, I've already begun imagining my next chapbook which is going to be something about “Under the Oaks.” I have all kinds of poems about these trees. I said to myself, Oh, I can put Alison Swan’s poem in there at the front of the book, your poem about standing on that porch [points next door] and looking at these trees. The one you published in the Bellingham Review, it’s not in any of your books.
No. It’s not.
So, find that poem, and give it to me.
I will.
I’ll see if I can use the whole poem as an epigraph.
Which was the poem you mentioned to me that hasn't appeared anywhere else besides here [Detail from the Garden of Earthly Delights]?
“Storm Oak Honey.” Detail was published by Andrew Carrigan. He did that little mimeographed magazine [I Stay Home]. You were in it.
Yes.
He did three books. One of his, one of Richard McMullen’s, and this is one of mine. They're pretty. Patrick Powers designed them.
And then he stopped after three?
Yes.
It’s a beautiful book.
Let’s talk about a line from Dream of the Black Wolf. I think Dream of the Black Wolf and Learning to Dance were the first two books of yours that I read.
When you moved in next door, I would have had that little chapbook Weather Report. Didn't I give you one of those? Knock on your door and say, Please read my poems?
I have no recollection of that—which does not mean it did not happen! My memory is of encountering your poems for the first time under formal circumstances—a reading at the Drum [Shaman Drum Bookshop, Ann Arbor].
Okay, so in Dream of the Black Wolf--
My little chapbook published locally.
Yes, 30 years ago, which is somewhat mind blowing. As I was rereading it, I noted: “when life felt so full of possibility.” So many of the things that have gone so wrong hadn't yet gone so wrong. And we were still feeling good about, for one example, the environmental legislation that was passed in the 70s. It wasn't quite clear yet how horrible deregulation was going to make things.
Until recently, I would think, “What's so bad guys? We've been through this before,” until Trump just finally got to be too much. When I was senior in high school, SDS was blowing up buildings and I remember talking to my friends—both of whom are now dead. We were driving in a car in South Bend, Indiana, and I said, “I get it now. I get it. I understand why people are blowing up buildings. And I think it might be important to blow up buildings.” 1969, South Bend, Indiana. So, I've looked into those dark places. We had to. Certainly not everybody did, but a lot of us did. Now everything seems so apocalyptic. The Apocalypse that we imagined then was nuclear.
Right.
We weren't ready for fire and flood, the Biblical kinds of apocalypses we're dealing with now.
I had really progressive high school English teachers. They all had PhDs and they were all men and we read mostly men. But it was all progressive. I read The Jungle in high school. I read The Crucible, Death of a Salesman. Coming of age in the late ‘70s your feeling was, so many problems had been, not fixed but--
Faced.
Yes, faced.
Let me read to you a bit from Dream of the Black Wolf: “I would like to be cold and clear-headed about these events but it is hard not to take them as signs.”
The last little prose fragment, right by Christine’s drawing of the cabin.
You would like to be cold and clear-headed?
I should be. It’s the part of me that wants to be a scientist. I should be cold and clear-headed about this. But there’s something about that moose swimming off into the glare of the rising sun and disappearing. That’s the reflection of the sun on the water. And that’s a moose and I should have its scientific name. I mean, that’s a big body of water she’s swimming into.
It's a profound moment.
Yeah. Just as we were paddling by in a canoe and Christine’s six months pregnant.
Am I sentimentalizing the moose by having it disappear in the sunlight? But the point is, yes, that’s what I do.
Well yes. It’s sentiment. It’s not sentimentalizing.
Yeah. Thanks!
I just read Stanley Kunitz’s interview in Paris Review—from the ‘70s. I didn’t agree with all of it but I enjoyed it. That’s the distinction he drew.
I’ve done that too. I probably stole it from Kunitz.
I like the distinction. And it is factual what you’re describing here.
It is.
And you’re putting it into a book of poems and that’s what turns it into something bigger.
The image at the end is what I would hope would dominate. Although moose could take over pretty much anything they’re in. People are interested in moose. Plus they’re circumpolar so the whole northern hemisphere knows them.
There are other moments in your books where you seem to feel it’s not okay to be moved by the beauty of the wide world.
Since there were negative comments. Someone reviewed me once: Taylor’s poems sometimes will end up being just reportage. Which I know and I don’t mind. The best example I have of this is in Marginalia for a Natural History, a poem that’s about freshwater mussels, dedicated to Sara Alderstein Gonzales.
They’ve got a fabulous name.
Wavy ridged lamp mussel or something like that. It’s also in The Bird-while, “A State-Threatened Species,” one that ended up part of a multi-media thing I did about the Huron River.
That was with paintings and dancing, right?
Yes.
Sara is very intense. Sometimes she says we have just killed everything. In the movie that’s been made as part of our homage, she’s going into the Huron River and picking up mussels and saying, “See. We’ve killed them all.” But there was one live mussel in her hand.
A State-threatened Species
For Sara Alderstein-Gonzales
The wavy-rayed lampmussel, yellow
or almost green, needs the small-mouthed bass
to host its young. Females siphon sperm
floating randomly in the river,
then lure the fish with a fake minnow,
squirting fertilized eggs into gills.
In a month the juveniles fall off
into sand. They try to start again.
The word “try” matters a lot.
The only sort of poeticizing in this whole thing. But the information’s so cool. The mussel’s on the list of state threatened species and the Huron River is the furthest north that it comes. Poems are supposed to do something other than report facts. I understand people will say that.
One of the few prompts I do—it’s in a book I was asked to contribute to, The Open Page, published by the Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, for their participants. That lovely Lew Welch poem starts it:
Step out onto the Planet.
Draw a circle a hundred feet round.
Inside the circle are
300 things nobody understands, and, maybe
nobody’s ever really seen.
How many can you find?
That became the way I taught at the Bio Station: Send people out into the woods. No matter how much you think you know about the natural world, you can go out there and find things you don’t know, easily. Just sit down and you’re going to see–an insect, a plant, something you don’t know. Write about that.
I wrote a bunch of those little poems—Jerry Dennis and I were talking about them, then I was at the Bio Station learning all these things. I said okay I want to do this book of poems for Jerry. And then I found that very restrictive little form.
Talk about the form of these poems. Do you remember which one you wrote first?
Yes, I do. I’ve done syllabics a bunch in my life. There are syllabics in that first little book that I’ve never reprinted—“Learning to Dance.” I got this form from Kenneth Rexroth who counted syllables all the time, a way to control the free verse line. It forces you to do lots of things. Since syllables don’t really resonate in an English ear, when the poem takes over you can just stop doing it or change it. You don’t have to stick to it unless you want to, and I wanted to. There’s a prose piece in an earlier book about crows in the backyard and me going out there in my bathrobe to chase the crows away and embarrassing my daughter.
Do you remember the name of it?
“This Fall’s Murder” – near the end I wrote an eight-line summary in 9-syllable verses.
I like the form. It’s kind of Japanese-y.
Then I was at the Bio Station. It might have been the first year. Phil Myers, then a UM mammals guy, was giving a talk on his research on the movement of the white-footed mouse. On the mainland of the lower peninsula there are no deer mice left.
He was describing how the deer mice were still in the UP, although the white-footed mice were coming around the other side of Lake Michigan and starting to take over. It was only on the offshore islands where deer mice remained. I took notes and when I went to organize them I’d say, well let’s see what happens with this, and I’d count 9 syllable lines.
Then I wrote the first one, “Not the Northwest Passage.” Everything massive we hear about climate change—but no, not the big thing, not the Northwest Passage! Just a little mouse moving north. “The white-footed mouse, delicate and doe-eyed” attacking “the necessary and impenetrable wall of cold.”
And then the second one. There was a woman up there for several summers, named Ola Fink, a damsel fly specialist. I took my students to Hemingway country because we were reading the Hemingway stories, to Horton Creek—site of that great picture of Ernie as a 6 year old, fishing. Ebony jewel-winged damsel flies were there, gorgeous, black-winged, green bodies. If you see them flying though the shade of a trout stream, the sun just coming down on these little things and going through the black wings and reflecting back up into the green bodies. They turn turquoise. Back at dinner I said, “The most fantastic thing, these damselflies. What are they called?”
“Ebony jewel-winged damselflies,” Ola said.
“Jesus, I’ve never seen them before.”
“Oh yes you have. You’ve seen them from the UP to the Huron River in Ann Arbor. They’re everywhere.”
And then of course after I knew what they were I saw them everywhere. “Ebony jewel-winged damselfly,” nine syllables! The gods have given me this.
Now I’ve got 2 poems about things floating around the eye’s corner but only seen when I learn their names.
What about the ellipses that begin a few of these poems?
I was thinking, these tiny little fragments, they’re going to come in the middle of some thought. That was going to govern all these poems. I probably wrote 70 or 80 of them.
Did you make the final selection or did somebody else?
I made the final selection.
That’s another book I owe to Steve Gillis. For a while, after he’d started Dzanc Books, he was incorporating other small presses. He gave that manuscript to Black Lawrence [Press] and then suddenly I had a book of poems. I think it has done well for them, at least for a chapbook.
It’s a friendly little book. People don’t like to feel dumb and I think some poetry makes people who don’t read a lot of poetry feel dumb. You can see yourself in these poems.
I just got the readers’ report of the Wayne State book. And both said, “accessible,” which for some contemporary poetry readers is dismissive, but it’s not for me. [A and K laugh] Because I know readers aren’t dumb and I know I’m not obscuring—a phrase I used to use which, again, must not be original—obfuscate the obvious. I do not obfuscate the obvious. I like to dwell in the obvious.
I like to dwell in the obvious.
A and K both at the same time: There’s the title of our interview
I have questions that are not specific to any books. Given that, on the surface, the main distinguishing element between poetry and prose is the line, the 21st century person who sets out to write a poem likely considers from the outset how the poem looks on the page. This seems more true now than ever. The page, whether material or virtual, becomes collaborator. For the prose writer, generally speaking, it does not. This may explain in part why I feel more affinity with the creative practices of visual artists than with any other kind of artist. And I know how important paintings are in your world.
Yes, paintings are very important in my world.
Care to comment?
It’s one of the things that hit me when I finally had to stop teaching graduate students. They would use that visual element—lines—to emphasize their subject. Many of them didn’t think of lines as metrical units, and they didn’t even think of them in stress patterns, the way for instance William Carlos Williams did.
“That’s a good line”: I think it’s a good thing that phrase seems to have disappeared. “That’s a good phrase” and “That’s a good sentence”—okay. But not “That’s a good line.” We overused that for decades. You’re old enough to have overused that phrase.
But why do some younger writers even think about line? I don’t think they know, other than the fact that that looks good and it helps them when they perform that poem. And that’s enough for many of these very successful poets who are 40 and younger now. And it probably is.
Hmmm. I have lots of thoughts about this. I very much enjoy thinking in terms of lines, not necessarily “good” lines, but interesting visual units and sonic units. The most basic definition of a poem—I mean this slightly tongue-in-cheek for sure—is “a piece of writing broken into lines.” I think of them as something I employ in the service of making a poem.
You do have a lot of people writing sonnets now, Di Seuss, for instance, though of course she is updating the traditional sonnet, keeping it 14 lines but extending those lines. Sometimes they’re so long you have to fold the page.
Right. Have you ever imitated a poet?
Yes.
It seems like your education started with--
The Great Dead. And then the French.
And the Greek
Cavafy
And the guy who saved you from prairie Protestantism.
Nikos Kazantzakis. He wrote Zorba the Greek. I got into the modern Greeks early, before I went to Europe.
How did that happen—oh, of course. That popular novel.
And I didn’t see the movie. The novel says at the end: “Men like me should live a thousand years.” It was sort of a southern European version of macho stuff.
Um hmm
Which really appealed to me when I was 15, when I also read Atlas Shrugged and attempted to walk around with piercing blue eyes—all of her characters have piercing blue eyes. And then I read Zorba the Greek which is just so generously spirited. And then Last Temptation of Christ and Report to Greco, which don’t read as well now. I’ve tried. But that was a big deal at the time and then I went to other Greeks. In the late 60s and early 70s, a lot of modern Greek poets were available in translations, easy to find in general bookstores. Then we went through a period when you couldn’t find a modern Greek writer to save your life, other than Cavafy. So yeah, Kazantzakis. He did write a big book of poems.
I came across a photo of me from around that time, the summer I went to the Yukon. I’d lost weight and I’d been working outdoors. And I had a lot of hair. It was curly and wavy.
You’d been living outside.
Yes. I rode a horse. I took the picture. I had a suitcase that was mostly full of books, including a gigantic book called The Odyssey, a modern sequel, written by Kazantzakis. Odysseus gets home, then leaves and goes looking—for meaning, perhaps? I still have it. It’s right over there.
So your reading at that age was your way of escaping your upbringing.
Yes. I was breaking out.
And it was kind of intentional. Do you think?
Yes, by that point. I had already broken free, but I was young enough that I still had to do what my parents told me.
Something we have in common, then, is the impact of novelists in our youth. And William Carlos Williams.
Williams came after I came back from Europe, where I associated with young post-1968 French intellectuals who were by and large 3 or 4 years older than me. I was 19 when I arrived in France. They had mostly finished their equivalent of an undergraduate education.
I fancied myself a young intellectual—which is why I was in France—but these French intellectuals knew I wasn’t an intellectual. They weren’t interested in my take on their ideas at all. What they were interested in was my Mennonite upbringing in Western Canada. That was the only time they’d listen to my stories. That made me think, maybe I have to value this stuff more?
Then I came back, and the glories of the ordinary in Williams became more important to me. You look up there, a lot of Williams on that shelf. I studied what he was doing with American language, his reaction against Eliot, who had been a big part of my life when I was in high school, and the high modernist stuff and Yeats. I have a poem that would be in my juvenilia, imitating William Carlos Williams. I published it in the student journal at Central Michigan University.
The fish
biting my toes
in the freshwater quarry
are nothing
but what they are
and I love them
for it.
That’s me imitating Williams.
And James Wright?
There’s a lot of James Wright phrasing in my poems, consciously or unconsciously. Wright came after Williams. I was in my mid 20s. The French were still in there, all the ideas the French introduced me to, things like symbolism and then all those poems about the city that Baudelaire wrote. And it was like, Oh, you can write beautiful poems about the city and understand the city, even the darkness there, in terms of natural images. Williams and Wright and then Denise Levertov after Wright. I spent several years pretty immersed in Levertov. I heard her read 3 times, twice in East Lansing and once in West Bloomfield, never here [Ann Arbor]. [laughs]
I’ve always been aware of this, but I definitely owe a debt to Diane Wakoski, because I was 19, at MSU, and that’s who she was showing us: Williams, Wright, Levertov, Frank O’Hara, Gary Snyder.
Yeah, Snyder. Leggett and his wife lived on 10 acres of land in the middle of the Manistee National Forest they called Turtle Island. And they named their first kid Jaffy, as in Jaffy Ryder in Dharma Bums. So I started reading Snyder then, when I got to Michigan. Leggett’s ten acres in a scrubby third growth forest taught me to love Michigan.
Your poem, “Faith at the Edge of Winter,” when I got to the end of it, I thought, That sounds like Snyder.
Oh yeah, yeah.
And then I turned the page--
And there’s this poem for Snyder.
Yes.
I don’t think that was intentional, Alison, but I totally see it. Yeah.
That was the only time in any of the books where I had a really strong feeling of, oh, that sounds like—It’s something else that I want to talk about actually.
Of that whole group of influences, Snyder is the only one with whom I’ve had an even tentative personal relationship. He’s the only one I know and talk to and occasionally correspond with. Oh, and Robert Hass.
What about Judith Minty? I think of her because I know you were friends and Diane introduced me to her work too.
She was a good buddy. Her poems are good. We corresponded. She wrote me a letter after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, essentially saying farewell.
I’ve read Yellow Dog Journal many times and I spent some time with her when I was working on Fresh Water. She was very calming and supportive. At one point she sent me an email that read, simply, “Courage.” It remains a talisman for me.
I went back to Central Michigan University—after I’d gotten together with Christine. I’d left Central without finishing a degree and I went back because Christine was there. Judith was teaching a class, contemporary poetry, that was filled with all my friends who were still in graduate school. She let me sit in. We read some good books, some difficult books. We met at her apartment.
She’d had a long life before she did an MFA at Western Michigan University. John Woods was there. Herb Scott. Herb did his graduate degree with Phillip Levine at Fresno. Herb was a manager of a grocery store.
Ross Gay did a reading and conversation with Steve Scafitti in a series called Poets on Favorite Poets. You made me think of this when you mentioned Charlottesville. You were writing about nature and knowing that you were going to get called out. Have you ever heard of Scafitti?
I saw that reference too.
You want to know about his poems. He is a cabinet maker and he’s quite a prolific poet and well published. He read a poem—there was a murder of a 9-year-old boy in his town. The circumstances around the murder, he said, were horrifying and he did not share them. He did tell us is that he had written 100 versions of the poem. He emphasized: 100 different poems about the murder. He checked himself into a hotel for two days to do this.
Wow.
Right now, the hair is standing up on my arms again, remembering. The connection I’m making: There are non-academic poets. We don’t want to call them anti-intellectual poets, and there’s the ugliness and the beauty and how all these things mix together. I’m wondering what you think about this. I’m very aware that if you don’t adopt a posture of cynicism, you are not going to get taken seriously in a lot of literary circles. I’ve always kind of ignored it. At this point in my life I’m more comfortable saying—Yeah. No. I’m not cynical. What are your thoughts about people—like Philip Levine, or Steve Scafitti—they get described as “regular folks” who write poems. It always feels a little patronizing. And you’ve observed there was a point in your life where you felt like Judith Minty wasn’t well read.
Yeah. When I was a snob. I made a very bad snob.
Are you still. Do you think?
No, except look at all these books around us. Twenty-five volumes of William Carlos Williams, 24 volumes of Ezra Pound—whom it seems nobody reads anymore, interestingly enough. I had such a haphazard education. I did at least attend some prestigious schools in Europe. I didn’t even know that you should be well-degreed. Then Williams got in there early enough, his anti-academic, or whatever we are going to call it, certainly not anti-intellectual (It’s very intellectual) but his anti-academic, his anti-Elliot stuff—I was still 23-24, so I could still be shaped by that.
I do live in Ann Arbor and I’ve been comfortable in Ann Arbor and the university was very good to me. And I did teach graduate students. As Charlie Baxter said to me once, “Keith, you’re one of us now.” [Both laugh]
That’s exactly what Lynne Heasley said to me at Western.
The very fact of poetry being the central pillar of your life kind of makes you, if not a snob, certainly[pause]
Weird.
Yeah. I mean I don't even want to use the word elitist but –
My brother-in-law asked me one time why he had never heard of any poets. I said well nobody’s ever heard of poets. Let me name you poets who won Nobel prizes recently: Seamus Heaney? Derek Walcott? He’d never heard of them. You wouldn’t think that having a Heaney book in the house would be that weird. But there are not that many Heaney books in the homes of people who are not Irish.
Yeah. I kind of appreciate the fact that it’s kind of counter cultural to live in poetry world.
Yeah, even though maybe most people think of it as high culture. When you say poetry, everybody knows what you mean.
They think.
It pops up on, what do Catholics call them, little prayer cards that you get at funerals. There’s poetry there and you will find it in a Methodist church bulletin. And newspapers used to put in poems from time to time. But at some point poetry started to feel inaccessible.
Once, I was speaking at a fundraiser for Inside Out at MOCAD [Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit] and most people, even though they were there for Inside Out and they knew poetry was part of the thing, were not avid readers of poetry. I said, “Many of you may think you don’t know poetry but I’m going to conduct you in a poem right now that everybody in this room no matter what your background knows, like a maestro. Hey diddle diddle/ the cat and the fiddle/ the cow jumped over the moon./ The little dog laughed/ to see such sport/ and the dish ran away with the spoon.” And 200 people were saying it out loud. Nobody was not saying it, even the 6 year olds. I said, “We all know that. And that’s a poem. And can anyone tell me what it means.” [laughs]
[laughs] Brilliant
I haven’t had a chance to do that again but I will. And we all enjoy reciting those verses aloud together.
Yes. I think resistance to poetry has a lot to do with resistance to pleasure and just pausing.
Yes. Yes.
And doing something just for the sake of doing it and not for any measurable outcome.
Yes.
That’s what I mean when I say it’s countercultural. Poetry goes against rushing and not paying attention.
You’re the master of the very particular observation—and this is interesting because “If the world becomes so bright” calls readers attention to too much illumination. You take an observation, and in making a poem that begins with it, make the observation larger than reportage. You illuminate.
I think I may have used that word a couple of times. I feel the same thing when I do it.
Your poems cast light upon things that often go unseen. I think this is what the best poems do.
That’s great. I think about this often.
And I mean, literally, things. With material existence.
I can show you these new poems I just wrote which are all things. I think a good deal of it is luck. What makes a poem something other than reportage? It’s the weight of metaphor. It’s the the readers or listeners. You’re articulating the thing itself. It resonates with them on a level that has something to do with metaphor, not this-equals-that, something else. It resonates because of their experiences.
Vallejo has that great poem: “I’m going to die in Paris with a Rainstorm…. It will be Thursday…” And Eric Torgerson wrote a poem a few years back where he says something like, I’m going to die swimming in Lake Superior on Saturday. So I wrote, “I’m going to die while I’m sitting in this chair on an April morning with gusty winds and watching the occasional sun hit the drops of light on a new leaf, a new fragile leaf.” You hope that the fragility of that coupled with the fact that I will come to die in this chair before this window perhaps on an April morning watching this will connect with other people.
Another one of these new poems is a memory I had from when my mother died in 1981. I was still smoking cigarettes and I’d go out in the backyard in southern California. It was April and the irises were just ready to burst open. I would be out there smoking with my mother dying in the next room. I could hear the sounds of the irises going, “Poof, poof.” That was one, 10 lines long.
Do you want to read that one?
It’s a poem I won’t be able to read much in public because my dead mother is in it.
[reads]
Irises in California
When I wanted to smoke,
I would step outside
the house in southern California
where my mother lay dying.
In the backyard there, in early April
purple irises strained to open.
When their petals finally
pulled apart, I could
clearly hear the puff
of their faint exhalations.
[First appeared in the Dunes Review]
I’d never written about that memory even though I’ve thought about it often. Other new poems, one about the berries at the end of the drive, fall witch hazel, another one, for Monica Rico, which I probably also couldn’t read aloud. Monica—in her new book [Pinion]—has a lot of owls. She was bringing those owl poems to her MFA workshops and a couple of people said, “Monica, get rid of the owls, too many owls.” I just said, “Well, fuck them,” when she asked me about it. “It doesn’t matter.”
I was sitting here—this is three weeks ago, a little moment of Indian Summer—and a screech owl came. The windows were open. It was calling from 50 feet away. So I wrote a poem called “No Great Revelations” about the screech owl, “for Monica Rico and her owls.” And another one, about the dryads in the backyards. I took dryads out of the title because I figure nobody’s going to publish a poem with dryad in the title unless you’re Sylvia Plath rejecting dryads. So I called it “Spirits in the backyard.” What do I call it? “The Long-lived Dryads”—that’s a Homeric epithet, “long-lived dryads.” So yes, they are all things that resonate with me. Another poem I did for Dunes Review, a poem for Dan Minock, before he died.
I’ve heard you read it.
I lost it, wept, could barely finish it. I’ve never read that poem since.
This goes back to that prose passage about the moose in Isle Royale. It is just a moose. My tree is just a tree, Sylvia says, but of course it’s also something else.
I think part of the reason we’re in the mess we’re in right now is because of silos, academic silos, which exist for very good reasons of course. When we first started this conversation, I asked you, Would you really like to be cold and clearheaded? Because that hasn’t really gotten us where--
[Laughs]
Let’s end with this thought today. You can respond. It seems to me that the objectivity—while it’s essential for some projects—isn't enough. I notice—I have friends who are conservation biologists. He studies fish and she studies cougars. They work in Olympic National Park and environs.
Cool.
They are quite realistic about the mess we are in, but they are ebullient in the way that they move through their lives. I run across this a lot—conservation biologists seem like they might be some of our best sources of how to be meaningfully resilient, based in reality but not despairing.
Yes.
New Agism, which is what you flirt with if you put dryads in your poem, is the opposite of what I mean because it is not engaged with things.
Yes.
I had the same experience with the Bio Station people. They knew a lot about what was threatening these things and how fragile they were, but they all seemed to be in such good moods all the time.
I was thinking about the Bio Station people I met, too, as ebullient. I was thinking about my colleagues at Western who are scientists. Gary Snyder, too. I think I might feel this way about you, though I think you try to tone it down.
Because I’m a Protestant.
And maybe because you were navigating academia.
Yeah. I was. Although I came to that so late [at 47 years] I feel I was protected by some self formation before. But in our argument against Fox News and everything, we’re all saying, why don’t you just listen to the science? Take your vaccine.
I know, and it’s not working. This is what I would say to my students [at Western Michigan University]. Thank goodness for the scientists. Thank goodness for the data. However, we’ve had the data about climate change for a long time. We need something in addition to the data. Right? I don’t know what that is, exactly, but I think it might have something to do with not being cold hearted about the facts.
Christine, one of the times she came up to the Bio Station, Deborah Goldberg had tanks where she was growing typha, the reeds. She said, “I need some people to come and help me measure things in the typha beds.” I had to go teach so Christine went and when she came back at lunch she said, “You know what I did all day? I measured the circumference of these reeds, 13 inches above the soil.”
Right? I know.
She said, I’m bored and plus I have a sore back and it’s hot.
I know. My colleague at Western studies invertebrates in Lake Michigan’s interdunal wetlands. She too must meticulously gather data in the field.
After three years, they get enough to publish a 4-page article that 10 people read, 3 of whom will respond to her. And that’s science. E.O. Wilson has a thing where he describes that process, how tedious it is. Every now and then someone will make a leap in knowledge.
I did get to know the people who were working on Pitcher’s thistle. Do you have Pitcher’s thistle in the Saugatuck Dunes?
Yes.
There’s a new nature conservancy area north of Elk Rapids. I have told them I will write about it. I’m going up to do a reading and a workshop next week. I’m going to park myself in this new natural area and write about the dunes and the water. I know Pitcher’s Thistle because people were doing a lot of work on them at the Bio Station. I've seen Pitcher’s thistles at Sleeping Bear.
[The resulting poem, “Beach-walking, with Cane and Thistle ” is now on a sign at the entrance to the Wilcox-Palmer-Shah Nature Preserve.]
I have seen them but not in a long time.
They’re thick at Wilderness State Park.
Good. They are not thick at Saugatuck Dunes State Park.
***
A second conversation, again in Keith’s study, took place on November 29, 2024.
Alison: I’m interested in hearing you talk about doing a selected poems. How in the world do you decide which poems? How does one choose and how did you choose? So that's one question. And then another question is: what did you learn in the process of doing it?
Keith: They are, in my mind, the same question, because I learned a lot. I start this book in 1977, when I was 25. That was right about the time I felt I had a breakthrough, where I started writing the poems that were closer to my adult poems. I was over trying to be T.S. Eliot or Charles Baudelaire. The breakthrough poem was a poem about my religious upbringing in Alberta. And it's not in the Selected because it feels a little ragged to me now, "Elegy for Norman Taylor." I wrote that over Christmas of 1976. That was the breakthrough, the family stuff.
Could you say just a little bit about—if you could, it's a long time ago—what was it that made you think to yourself, oh, this is a breakthrough poem?
I knew it right away. I've never been one to share my new poems enthusiastically. “Oh, I just wrote a poem. Listen to this.” But I did with that poem. I took it to my friend Mike Simpson, who died way too young. And I think I read it to somebody else within 24 hours of writing the poem. There was the colloquial language. It told the story of my uncle who was a hydrocephalic. It had some of the god stuff in it. It was a fairly long poem for me, three or four pages. It was also my first poem that got a prize. Robert Bly gave it an honorable mention. He read a tiny little poem about a loon, which was the winner, and then he read mine. He said “It's a good story, but it's removed from the poet's soul.” But thanks, anyway.
[Both laugh]
That was at the end of a couple of years when I'd been reading a lot of Williams. It felt like everything came together in that poem. Then I read it at the first reading I ever gave in the state of Michigan [Northwestern College]. Dan Gerber was there, Mike Delp, Jack Driscoll—Judith Minty may have been there. Everybody raved about that poem. So I knew the Selected was going to start with a poem from that time.
That was also the time I met Christine. Early on in this Selected, there's the first love poem, “Refusing Pygmalion.” I had also written several poems about being a house painter. So, there was the family history stuff, a love poem with a classical reference, a work poem. There’s also a poem called "White Pine Stumps." At the beginning of Wolf Jim Harrison describes finding the white pine stumps. I'd just started reading Harrison, too, so that was all on my mind. Michigan nature—which I've never stopped writing about.
And the Yukon.
Yeah, working for the hunting outfitters. There are a lot of poems where work—other than creative work—plays a significant role. And “Refusing Pygmalion" is also a poem about art. There's seven, eight poems in this book about art. That was one of the discoveries: I'd written so many poems about art along the way.
There's an early poem called "Living Here."
In the middle of the thing
or walking through the arcade, I wait--
I wait because the only lesson
I’ve learned is that the gift comes
in its own time, and goes
without scent or taste or flashing signs.
Six lines long! Published it in the MacGuffin, at Schoolcraft College, then it appeared in a 10-page chapbook, that M. L. Liebler published in his Ridgeway Press. It didn’t appear anywhere else. My friend Pete Becker, who I must have given a copy in 1988 when it came out, told me that he was visiting his daughter-in-law, found that poem tacked up on her pegboard. Steve Whiting wrote me, “I just memorized this little poem of yours. It's the only one short enough that my brain can memorize.” He worked with Judith Becker in ethnomusicology at Michigan—a nice connection.
I knew I was going to use "After Twenty Years.” Right before that in Guilty at the Rapture, there's another little love poem called, "Metaphor for the Long Married." Christine Rhein wrote me a letter about putting that poem in cards that she sends to friends who are celebrating a 20/25/30th anniversaries. So that poem made it into the Selected too.
There are other poems that probably should be in there. But partly because I didn't want to include page numbers or a table of contents, I figured I could push 80 or 90 pages but not 150.
So let's talk about that a little bit more. Not having page numbers is something that I hadn't considered until Jill Peek did it with her Alice Greene chapbooks. I thought, I love this. It’s so clean. But it does make it hard for other people to discuss the book with each other.
I know.
So I just went ahead and numbered the pages myself and made a table of contents.
[Smiles] I love the look of Mary Ruefle’s Selected—which I think does have page numbers, but it does not say where poems are from or group them thematically. My sense was, any thematic unity was going to arrive organically. I wasn't going to impose one. I thought that the lack of page numbers would help.
I told Steve Gillis that if I live into my 80s and have new poems to collect, I’ll do a collected then. I would put page numbers in that one.
Such elegant, restrained poems – that was a powerful reaction I had to rereading all of your books in chronological order so it’s no surprise that your Selected is elegant and restrained. It is also deeply affecting.
Good.
Less is more. I’m all for that. Even if some of my favorites aren’t here.
With the Selected—putting these poems together in this way—you have made a new piece of art.
That's the hope. And new for me too. I am happy to be known as a Michigan nature poet. People can dismiss me or praise me, which is fine. But this new book does go somewhere else.
Yes, it does. And I love that about it. But you did teach at the Bio Station and you do know a lot more than the average person about—let’s call it Great Lakes nature.
Right. Yeah. And the Selected shows it. It starts out with that poem about my religious grandmother. And ends with a poem about art forgery—one of the few intentionally created voices that is not my own.
I finished with poems published in 2017, partly because that's forty years. And also that's when I published The Bird-while. There is no overlap between the Selected and What Can the Matter Be?
And what did you learn about yourself as a poet?
There's a consistency of effort. The fact that I kept at it.
Is it fair to say this is really more about you being sure that the poems deserve to be in another book?
Yeah. Some of these poems were in magazines. They were in chapbooks. They were in books. This Selected is the fourth time they've been published.
There are poems, I would have encouraged you to keep.
Yeah, Marc Sheehan feels that way too. Those early poems were shaped by him. My first chapbook, Learning to Dance, Marc deeply revised a good deal of that.
I bet. But the Selected is perfect.
If I die, Alison, you can edit my collected poems. There are poems that I don't want in the collected poems. Poems that seem sloppy, or might even use unintentional but cruel language. And I changed some things in this one.
I did a poem in my prose book, Life Science in 1995, called "Gypsy Fragments." And I don't want to use that word “gypsy” anymore. So I don't have any idea what else you could call it now.
Travelers—but how would that work?
These three fragments, all of them were experiences with Roma people when I was living in Europe.
In the Selected, there's the hitchhiking poem, each line only has four syllables, so it’s a hard one to revise. I have a line near the end. “I hadn't figured/on Grand Rapids,/a city that's/always bigger/than you might think./I was stranded for hours/downtown…” In the original version of that, which is in Guilty at the Rapture: “I hadn't figured/on Grand Rapids,/a city that's/always bigger/than it should be.” It felt like I was dissing Grand Rapids.
Let’s talk instead about the Lake Michigan poem that's in the Selected, the one after Whistler. “Sea and Rain Lake Michigan.” It's a perfect poem.
Do you know the Whistler painting in the U of M art gallery?
Remind me.
Up on the second floor. Whistler wasn't on Lake Michigan. He was on the French Normandy coast. In the anthology that Richard Tillinghast did in the 90s, Charlie Baxter wrote about that painting.
The book of ekphrastic poems, A Visit to the Gallery.
Charlie, made the human shape a disappearing figure. I was thinking okay, well, that spooky ghostly figure comes in there, and suddenly that otherwise abstract painting becomes representational. You see that it's beach and clouds.” I have participated in two dance performances on the shore of Lake Michigan--a big production, with Jessica Fogel who taught in the dance department at Michigan. One of her big site-specific dances premiered on the beach at Muskegon Lake. I wrote "Circle in the Wind"—which is in Bird-while—for that. So—beautiful dancers dancing on the beach. Then Elizabeth Schmuhl sent me a dance video that she did.
It’s gorgeous.
My Whistler poem is part of that. When you get these bodies moving, then you realize it's a seascape. I mean, there'd be no way to misinterpret it. When the Syrian artist, Khaled al-Saa’I, was commissioned by the [University of Michigan] Art Museum to do something on the Great Lakes, he searched online and found my poem. He translated the poem into Arabic and then used the words and letters to make that swirling, dancing figure. I got to put his painting on the cover of my book which has the poem in it. That was just too cool.
Yes—and elegant and restrained.
Yeah, the book design was by Shoshana Schultz, one of my daughter’s dearest friends.
Along with elegant and restrained I made the note that the early poems feel old fashioned, which is compatible with being elegant and restrained.
I’m often embarrassed how 19th century my life seems, just because of where I came from, the people I came from. The fact that I had a real relationship in my lifetime with the Women's Christian Temperance Union is weird. I'm old but I'm not that old.
I mean, part of my experience of wilderness was working for the hunting outfitter, which feels almost 19th century.
It does.
You're out there in the bush.
Breaking trail on horseback.
Yeah. I still have the scar on my left foot--I put an ax in my foot. There are other things, the religious stuff and my fascination with some of the traditional figures of literature.
Which poem is it where you mention reading nothing but books written in the first millennium?
"A Monk's Rule" –"but for you my love, evenings I would read nothing but books written in the first millennium.”
Yes. [both laugh]
Is there anything specific that you would like to say about the difference for you between writing prose poems and lineated poems?
I twice taught a class at U of M called “the prose poem and the very short story.” Both classes went well but the first time I taught it was the best classroom experience I've ever had in my life. And that was partly because I was excited but also just an incredible group of students.
That alchemy. Sometimes it happens.
Many of the people in that class have since had enormous success. I think the definitions are useful, even useful in actually writing new work. However you want to define meter, which could come from repetition or any number of other devices you can find in verse, that definition is obvious. But there's a rhythm in prose. As soon as you read it out loud, you can hear it. Anaphora certainly applies to prose as much as it does to poetry. Gertrude Stein has that one long essay, what's it called? “Poetry and Grammar” or something like that, where she said, prose is a verb and poetry is a noun. I don't necessarily agree with that. But when you think of the amount of poetry that simply builds by repetition, or by accretion of details, it can seem like a useful distinction, For instance, the poem of mine about the 8:35 bus lists all the things that we will do once we no longer have to go to work. That could be a little paragraph of prose somewhere, but it's not. It's repeating all these nouns rather than moving action forward. So there's that: there's an expectation of action and information with prose. Now, I do like to think that poetry contains information.
Definitely. In fact, I like to learn from poems.
There really is a difference. I think all the space that's around a poem slows the reading down. Of course at this point in my life, I'm just not sure if that's just the effect of my education as a reader of poetry.
When I was editing Fresh Water, I was influenced by what was then a brand new book, The Next American Essay, edited by John D'Agata. He removed line breaks from poems and offered them as essays. I remember specifically a James Wright poem that he turned it into a little block of prose. I did that with some poems for Fresh Water—with their authors’ permission of course. I didn’t want to scare away readers who don’t want to read poems.
I totally understand. The poet Michael Heffernan wrote an essay where he took one of James Wright's prose poems, dedicated to Robert Bly, and he made a sonnet out of it. Heffernan makes a point that he's pretty sure that Wright wrote it as a sonnet. The rhymes are even there and the meter. Heffernan thinks Wright did it as a sort of, you know, an “in your face” to his buddy Robert.
[Alison laughs]
You know what this reminds me of? What would you think about taking Walden and adding paragraph breaks and maybe shifting some of the punctuation?
It will be more readable?
Exactly. You don't even have to change a word.
Yeah, it'd be a lot easier to read.
What would you tell a young writer about learning how to break a line?
The first thing you have to learn is phrasing. Our buddy Alice Fulton wrote about that. If you're just thinking in terms of phrasing–that can lead to wildly different line lengths. You can be really playful—like Fulton’s early poems—on the page. If you want to then go to meter and if you want to then go to end-stop rhyme, then you're going to know where the break's supposed to go, on the phrase. Once you learn how to do that, you can attack the phrase to get more tension. So you know, put a line break between the adjective and the noun. Some of the great Modernists would put a line break after a preposition.
Enjambment can be really fun.
Yeah.
Enjambment became really important to me when I was doing syllabics. My own rule is that I don’t divide a word. You end up with weird enjambments and I thought that was great. Now in some of my longer poems, where the syllabics aren’t immediately obvious, my enjambment has been criticized by people who expected the line breaks to be on the phrasing.
So lines are important, what they stress. We think that they stress the ending and I have had some endings that I just love, “After Twenty Years,” for instance, is about watching snowy egrets copulate. That started out as a syllabic poem. “We hope they felt some kind of pleasure.” Line break. “Too,” period. “It looked as if they did.” That was one of those line breaks where you got some weight out of the end of the line. And you get a lot of weight out of the beginning of the next line. Something like that is kind of the ideal.
I shared some of my poems with my students at Western at their request. The poems were not part of the syllabus. And the students were not English majors. I asked them to consider the line breaks. I don’t know if they would have done it automatically. They saw effects like you just described. It struck me that part of poetry feeling more friendly to more people who don’t think they can read poetry is just posing the right questions.
Yeah.
Then they ran with it.
When you’re in the tiny percentage of the population that’s spent a few decades reading poetry, you kind of forget when these things became a part of your reading habits.
Indeed. Okay, home. I’m going to tell you something I’ve been thinking then I’d love to hear your thoughts. You and I are both identified with Michigan nature. You were born in Western Canada. I was born in Michigan and my ancestors on both sides go back in both peninsulas. Michigan is a place where I feel a great sense of duty, responsibility. It’s not a place of liberation for me. And, when I read your work, I feel that for you Michigan is a place of liberation.
Absolutely.
And then I think of Muir in California and Leopold in the Southwest, prose writers I know, but they’re taking off the mantle of the responsibility of home and going to a new place and having it be--
looking for home.
I was going to say, liberating. If you would reflect on that.
You’re absolutely right. I do have ancestral connections to the Great Lakes. One side of my family was given land in 1812 for fighting with the British against the American invasion of lower Canada. But when I first came to Michigan, I had no immediate family here. For a little while, some of my people weren’t very far away, but then they moved back west.
Indiana is not that far away.
South Bend is 6 miles south of the state line. I moved to Michigan in ‘75 and they left in ’77, exactly the moment I got together with Christine. I was 25. I first ran away from home when I was 16. I came back and finished high school but basically things freed up for me then. My parents were too afraid I was just going to disappear. So I basically traveled from 16 to 25 with no one. And I loved it.
That comes across in your poems from that time, the pleasure and richness of it.
But when I traveled to Michigan and stayed for a while and got to know some people: Steve Leggett and his first wife who lived in a cabin in the Manistee National Forest and my friend Russ Fimbinger, the guy who just texted me from his deer blind, and his wife Lizzie who lived on a farm in North Central Michigan. Still do. I envied their connection to that place. It took me years to realize that they were not living lives I would want.
Then, I envied that rootedness. I was ready to settle down and in those years of traveling there was too much substance abuse. And it was also 1968 to 1975 so there was also promiscuity in there and that wasn’t very satisfying. The solution to it seemed to be home.
Home allows you to do the kinds of things that had become important to me, certain kinds of activism, things which are a lot easier to do once you're in a particular place.
It’s true.
So there’s always been stuff I’ve been doing. I was on the board of the Ecology Center when they spun off Recycle Ann Arbor to the city’s trash system. I’m on the board of directors now for the Bird Center of Michigan which does bird rescues for injured and sick birds, wild birds.
So is it safe to say that Michigan as home, for you, equals chosen responsibilities and duties rather than ones put upon you?
Yes. I do feel duty but nothing like generational duty like you would feel. If I were to feel that, and sometimes I would like to, I’d be in Alberta, trying to fight the left-wing fight against the right-wing Albertans. That would be an ugly thing.
You sometimes seem to suggest that Michigan is more a part of Canada than of the U.S.
You’re right. It’s because of the Great Lakes-- I mean, I know Michigan is American. I know that. [both laugh] But the lakes, they make the boundaries different.
The border is very different.
It’s not the 49th parallel, which you could build a wall on, if you had the urge.
It was a cool place to grow up, in this way at least. To just decide to go to Windsor for the night and then be in a different country without having to show a passport or driver’s license. You just--
I know. At some point in the ‘60s and early ‘70s when I looked freakier they would stop me a lot at the border, so I got real paranoid. A few years ago we were approaching the border and I’m getting all nervous. “Does everyone have paperwork ready?” And Christine says, “Keith, you’re now old, bald and white-haired. Nobody’s gonna say anything to you.”
[both laugh]
My family would go to Pinery Provincial Park when I was a kid and my dad would buy fireworks to bring back to Michigan [they were illegal in Michigan then]. The border guard would ask if we had anything to declare and my dad would say no and we would all sit there quietly. It’s a fun memory because he’s a by-the-book guy.
It is a different place. When you’re on the south side of Superior and look north, there’s very little civilization that’s north of you. It’s one of the last great places on the planet.
It’s true. And the U.P. is pretty wild, if not pristine.
Yeah. If you do spend a lot of time above the Soo and then come back down, suddenly the U.P. feels crowded. But then you have to remind yourself that no, it’s really not.
All right, a question about “The Weaver,” one of my favorite poems of yours.
I like that one too.
I remember vividly the first time I heard you read it. There’s a flight of fancy--of imagination, something you don’t do very often, in that poem. There are a couple of other poems in the selected that do that: “Detail from the Garden of Delights” and “New Language.”
Well, those are very different poems. I can see why you put them together.
My friend, Dan Minock, now gone—all my friends are dead—sent me a postcard of that Detail.
No, not all your friends are dead.
Thank you, Alison. Dan and his wife were in Madrid. Dan sent me a postcard, a detail from Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Delights.” In that detail were almost all of those birds, European versions not American versions, but they shared the same names. So it occurred to me that I can just look out here [from his study] and see the Garden of Delights. I ended it with the “spectacle of joy,” which is a phrase of mine that I still like. “The Weaver”--
What I wanted to ask you specifically about “The Weaver,” if I may interrupt you.
You can.
Describe the origin of it. It conjures a very specific landscape for me.
Midwestern gravel pit. This is the gravel pit that’s out over here off Liberty.
I know that one but I haven’t walked in it.
You can’t walk in it but you can sneak around the side where these birds actually do nest. That weaver is Sheri Smith, who lives right over here. She is a world famous fiber artist. Her house is just full of birds and bats.
Wait. She’s the bird lady? The one you bring bats to?
And birds too. She’s the one who got me on the board of the Bird Center because she’s a bird rescuer. I’ve helped her with loons and grebes. She told me this story. In the spring, when cliff swallows have returned and are building those little nests, Sherri and a friend go out there, and they rip open an old feather pillows. They throw the feathers out and the birds come in as the wind is picking them up. Do the birds pick feathers from her hair? She said they would swoop right in over her shoulders.
It’s real.
Yeah. The one that is more a complete flight of fancy is “The New Language.” I like studying languages. I’ve studied probably ten. French is the only one I’ve learned well. I go back and read a book in French, and I still get this feeling that I’m entering a part of my brain that is not used otherwise. It feels clean and fresh and filled with the possibility of discovery.
Lovely.
I translated from Modern Greek and published a book [Battered Guitars: The Poetry and Prose of Kostas Karyotakis, co-translated with William Reader], but since I haven’t done anything with Greek in 20 years, it’s fading. Some others I can still read to some degree slowly and awkwardly. I like how it feels in your brain when I’m trying to do a little bit of work in another language. It’s like I’ve gotten my way into a new place in my brain. I’ve had to pry the door open and it squeaks on its hinges, but once you’re in there, it smells beautiful. It’s clean. All the drawers are unopened, waiting. Then finally I wrote that little poem.
I didn’t assume that you were talking about a foreign language. I was imagining ways that poetry opens doors–drawers.
And that’s certainly occurred to me that people could read that poem that way.
We were going to talk about the speakers in your poems “To Face the Ordinary” seems to come from the same place as my poem “Back Country.”
That’s not in the Selected. It never had much of a play before Bird-while.
I know, but let’s talk about it anyway since I like it a lot.
[Reads]
There are moments when you step alone
from the forest into a long valley high
in the mountains, moments you will remember
when you sit for five minutes decades later,
catching your breath to face the ordinary world.
You look out and see moose or caribou
moving through the scrub. You stoop down
to tracks in the mud and spread your fingers
to measure the foot that walked here
(the paws larger than your hand).
These moments, still filled with joy and fear
because an inch or two outside the track
are the clear, deep marks of a grizzly’s claw.
That’s another real moment in my life. In the summer of 1969 way up at the BC-Yukon border. I was alone and I had to walk 20 miles from one camp to another camp. I didn’t start out till 4:30 in the afternoon. Of course it never gets pitch dark there that time of year, but the darkness is really weird. It’s spooky semi-darkness. They did give me a gun, a WW2 gun that hadn't been fired in 25 years. It felt terrifying when I got to that valley and there was a grizzly print. But it was also such joy. When I was teaching for a living, and I’d have to open the door to someone complaining about something, I’d think well, at least remember the grizzly paw print.
Love it.
Those things where there’s both joy and terror
“You” is you.
Yes, I was there.
And the moment happens again and again in your memory.
And it helps you get through the otherwise dull shit that can sap your soul.
So it does come from the same place as my poem, “Back Country,” the one with the cougar tracks. You feel all the joy all again.
Yeah. Yeah.
It is so hard to describe to people who have never experienced it.
Right. There’s something out there that doesn’t much care about you and would kill you in a minute. And isn’t that cool.
And it’s not likely to. That’s something I talk with Sophie [Alison’s daughter] about. No, we’re not unduly risking our lives going into the back country camping. We are fully armed with good information about how to be safe, which is really different from the way TV and movies portray it.
Right. Though they did give me a gun.
One more question—well, two actually, that seem related. I was reading an interview with Ocean Vuong in which Peter Do--he’s a designer--describes seeing other designers who, quote, look like him, end quote, in the atelier next door and thinking, I could do that. Was there a person like that for you? And what seems related to me: Keeping faith. How do you keep faith? Who or what helps you keep faith?
I started trying to write poems early. And that meant that I was an autodidact. Nobody in my world knew anything about poetry. Grandma Finlay wrote poems about God. Nobody cared. I didn’t have writers around me until I moved to Michigan. I was just discovering things.
From books.
From books. And I would go to readings. That was the nice thing about being in South Bend. There were readings at Notre Dame. James Dickey was one of the first. Now everyone, when they refer to him, calls him a forgotten poet. He’s not forgotten by me. The people around then were the great white men of that generation. Dickey. Ginsberg came through then. [James] Wright. Wright even looks like me.
People from my socio-economic class? No. Although none of those people were that far removed.
So is it fair to say, you would look at James Wright or James Dickey and you would think, I could be that.
It’s maybe just by luck that Wright ended up at Kenyon College on the GI Bill taking his first poetry class with John Crowe Ransom. Not knowing about the barriers was probably a good thing for me.
Sustaining the faith. I do find there are so many examples of people who have not sustained the faith who had moments where they did really good work and the world acknowledged that work. Then they stopped or got embittered. And I have never stopped nor become embittered. And why is that?
I have friends. I’ll bring up Stephen Leggett again. My new book is dedicated to him. He writes every day and is absolutely insistent about it. And his poems are wonderful. He is absolutely dedicated to the art, and wildly indifferent to the business of the art. He’s a wonderful example to me. He has a kind of purity I admire.