An Interview with Michael McGriff

-by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum: The first time I read “Iron,” the first poem in your book Dismantling The Hills, I was pretty much just blown away.  And it’s not hard to say why.  The language is beautiful and intense.  The narrative is clear.  And it’s a poem of importance; a poem that speaks of childhood, of our dreams, of hatred and cruelty, of mythology, of landscape, of human yearning, of the earth’s landscape (local and cosmic), and of God, and of regret. Before we talk about this poem, would you mind telling us a little bit about your aesthetic in general?

Michael McGriff: First off, thanks for what you say about “Iron.” My aesthetic? I don’t have an aesthetic agenda, if that’s what you mean. I love images. I’m addicted to film and photography, for the way a simple image—or a sequence of images—can suggest an entire history or a vast emotional landscape. Images appeal to some mysterious, unconscious place in us, and I feel that poetry, at its best, holds a conversation with that place. But you can’t just heap a bunch of images on top of each other and call that a poem. A poem has to come from a voice, and that voice has to grapple with the world it struggles to make sense of. There are things I believe in, and my images come from those beliefs.

AMK: What is it about poetry that most draws you to poetry?

MM: The first poet I fell in love with was Neruda. I literally couldn’t believe what I was reading. Here was this big-hearted, wildly surreal poet telling me that work and workers were important, that every shitty job I had had was as mysterious and lyrical as anything else. Suddenly everything could be art—logging roads, chip trucks, the endless gray rain in Oregon. Wanda Coleman has this great poem where everything she looks at becomes Neruda. Neruda this, Neruda that, my toothbrush Neruda—however it goes.  So I guess inclusion draws me to poetry. You can be a kid from a logging town and you can be a poet—you don’t need permission from anyone, you don’t need an institution or a pedigree.  You need a notebook and a library card. I love that about poetry.

AMK: What do you look for in a poem?

MM: Anything that comes from a singular place, a voice. I don’t care if it’s overtly political, wildly surreal, or witty and subversive. As long as it comes from some urgent place, and as long as the reader is given some avenue into the work. 

AMK: What do you look for in your own poetry?

MM: I’m not sure if I’m explicitly looking for something in my own writing. If I’m being true to some impulse or some obsession, then I’m doing all I can. I’m stunned when poets sign up for some partisan battle and cry out “I’m a neo-Greek-allusionist poet” or “I’m a meter-as-morality poet” or “I’m a new-new-new-New York School poet” or “I’m an experimental-jazz-hands poet” or “I’m an Al Gore’s-nail-clippings eco poet” or whatever. If a narrative impulse guides a poem, then great. If surreal images flood into it, then why not? If you write “Black milk of daybreak we drink it at sundown,” then all the better. Poetry has to be impulsive, not governed.  That’s why all of these concept books and so-called project books are often so flat. I can’t imagine making up a rule that says I have to write 600 sestinas in the voice of Pinocchio’s shin bone. What if you woke up one morning and wanted to write a 3-line poem about cottage cheese or World War III? Do you ignore that voice and keep talking out of your shin bone?  Don’t get me wrong—there are some stunning books that follow strict structures and self-imposed thematic rules. Maurice Manning is a poet who knocks it out of the park every time, and his books take on these sorts of structures. But you can tell with a book like Bucolics that he’s using structure and theme as a leaping-off point and not as an arriving point. 

AMK: Earlier this year, I read “Iron” to a friend and I’ll never forget when she looked up from listening and said “Man, that’s a sexy poem.”  We laughed about that and then went through underlining all the wonderful images (the gypo trucks leaving miles of gravel dust / eddying around us”), moments of imagination (“illuminated before the sight / of water as it rushed beneath the massive turbines / spinning on the beige and dusty hills”), metaphors (the plastic bladder / of his waterbed”), and the words themselves (gypo trucks, slash pile, funnels, blueprints, Whale’s Mouth, etc…).

It’s hard for me to imagine this being an easy poem to write.  It’s just got too much going on and all with such clarity.  Can you tell us about how “Iron” came to be; where you began, how various elements came into the poem, how long it took to put together, etc, etc…? 

MM:  This poem comes out of a time when I was exceptionally frustrated. I was hammering on this long, uncooperative poem—I think it was about 10 pages or so—and my dinosaur of a laptop died. My hard drive gave up on life, and it took this really long poem with it. I was feeling all self-important: “My masterpiece is dead!...” and so on. I just sat around feeling bad for myself and watched a bunch of movies. I can see now that this long poem I was working on wasn’t really worth a damn—I was writing about something I didn’t really care about; now I can’t even remember what that poem was about! I watched all of these great documentaries on astrophysics. As soon as you learn that we first determined the elemental composition of space by mere observation, losing a poem to a box full of circuits doesn’t seem so significant. I was also watching every film version of Joan of Arc that I could get my hands on during this time. I was sitting around one night and this memory of a woman I knew from my past came back to me. She had a horrible family—an evil family—and she was a victim of terrible abuse. I started writing about her and came up with a sort of composite character comprising a few women I had known in the past.  In the end, the “you” in my poem is really quite imagined, though my feelings for her are 100% real. The celestial imagery in “Iron,” and the image of Joan of Arc, obviously came from the films I was watching. Getting that long poem erased from my laptop was a blessing. I was getting precious about my poetry, and I needed to be reminded that there are pressing things to think and write about. I needed to be reminded that self-importance and apathy are always lurking in the wings.  And, like all the poems in Dismantling the Hills, this poem draws the core of its images from the rural Oregon logging town where I grew up. But this is pretty much the process of writing a poem, isn’t it? You get an idea and then all of these seemingly disparate images and emotions start swimming in your head and talking to each other.

AMK: There are some wonderful leaps in this poem.  Some are literal, such as when we leap five years from the speaker’s early childhood to high school.  But then there are leaps in the tone/meaning of the poem that occur that are a bit more drastic, such as “If my life has been a series of inadequacies” and “In the book I read before bed…”

I’m always terrified that readers won’t be able to follow such leaps unless I make it extremely clear why or how I’ve made them.  How is it, do you think, that these leaps are so dramatic and, yet, not only clear but perfectly believable?

MM: I’m glad you’re so convinced! Generally speaking, I don’t like my hand held in a poem. I recently watched Revolutionary Road. When I left the theater I felt absolutely insulted—the director didn’t trust me enough to let me reach my own conclusions, so he piled up all of these obvious images of suburbia and conformity and bashed me over the head with them. I wasn’t a participant in that film, I was the recipient of a lecture. I don’t want to be told how to feel, I want to feel. If a work of art needs to explode out on some tangent, whether narrative or imagistic, then why not just go there? Larry Levis is the obvious contemporary example of how this works. Levis puts a lot of faith in the reader. He respects the reader enough to let the reader take the same gigantic leaps that he’s taking. There’s nothing worse than a work of art that doesn’t trust its viewer, reader, or listener. I love poets like Popa, Tranströmer, and Lorca for these very reasons. They go where they please, and they do so to create meaning. Nelly Sachs is another poet who puts a lot of faith in the image and in leaping. She’ll go anywhere, and when you follow her you’re bound to get crushed by the meaning and the sense of urgency she creates out of her imagistic leaping and her disjointedness.

AMK: You make use of an unidentified “you” in this poem.  This seems a little risky simply because there are those out there who will find this a distraction.  But I think it just adds to the mysterious nature of the poem.  And I’m not sure it really matters who she is…it’s perfectly clear she’s someone the speaker felt deeply for; someone he grew up with and loved. 

Were there drafts of this poem in which you identified this character in the poem more directly?  Were you ever concerned that this poem might encounter such criticism?

MM: I never really though about it, actually. Like I was saying, this character, though based on one individual, became a composite character as soon as I started writing “Iron.” Plus, I would never name someone like that, nor would I air a private tragedy for the sake of dramatic effect. All the characters in this book are composites to some degree. Even my own father becomes an imagined character, and I write about him at length and with factual details. 

AMK: “Ash and Silt” is a poem about the convergence of our past, present, and future selves, moving back and forth in time from the drive with Tonya, to the memories of the speaker’s father, and, in the final section, to the future.

You do all of this with the use of section breaks, which not only emulates the quick work of the mind but also allows you to avoid narrating these shifts, which would have worked as well but would have slowed the poem down and would have made for a totally different poem that, most likely, has been done before.

How did you come up with this form?

MM:  Like you were saying, this piece jumps around in time. I used the section breaks to signal that a change was taking place and hoped that the reader could follow. Originally the poem was one long piece. I liked it that way, but found that it could get pretty confusing. So I threw it into sections, and that seemed to ground the poem, and to give the reader a little breathing room.

AMK: Do you worry much about writing something new or writing in a way that hasn’t been done before?

MM: Not really. I think that if you follow your impulses you’re bound to write something new. There’s only one me. And if I write like me, then I’m writing something unique. That’s not to say that what I’m writing is any good—but I try to stick to my impulses, regardless of what happens. 

AMK:  Do you find the writing of poetry an emotionally painful or disturbing act?  I ask this because of the following couplets which seem to indicate that, no matter what you do, you are drawn back to and haunted by the past; your voice:

          Tomorrow I’ll wake in the back of the Chevy,

          In Tonya’s arms, in my father’s bedroom,

          to another voice begging for the light to return

          …

          I’ll wake to the story of my life and enter

          this same God-dead town again and again until I vanish

          inside my own voice…

MM:  Not at all—I love to write. Writing a check to the US Department of Education each month is a painful and disturbing! But to answer you seriously—I find that not writing is painful. When I stop writing or get stuck it feels like I’ll never be able to do it again, that I’m wasting oxygen, and that what I’ve written in the past is a lie. But then I read a poet like Don Domanski, and then I make a few notes, and then the world comes back into focus. Regarding those lines you quote—I do feel like everyone is hard-wired to their past. How can’t we be? Sometimes the past is good, sometimes it’s painful. That’s life.

AMK: “Coos Bay” might be my favorite poem in this book.  I just love how it describes your hometown with a list of local images (The World’s Largest Lumber Port, / the yellow hulk of Cats and winding bayfront chip yards) seamlessly interrupted with sudden bits of story (“my grandmother dying over the ridge,” “my father and the machinist neighbor / dying of cancer huddle around / an oil drum burn barrel and smoke cigarettes”).  First you draw un in with this constant influx of images, smells, landscapes, and sounds.  Then you keep us reading with these small pieces of narrative that remind us why all these beautiful and ugly things are worth reading about.

Do you think it’s important to compose a poem in such a way that it keeps the reader reading?  While this may seem like a really obvious question, I’m not sure poets think about this as much as they should: how to make sure the reader not only starts reading our poems but keeps on reading once the luster of those first lines (or of the narrative itself) has worn off.

MM: Yeah, I know what you’re saying, and I think that those problems are especially true for a poem like “Coos Bay.” “Coos Bay” is very simple, structurally—it’s a list. The decisions are: In what order do I put the objects? Where do I start? How do I end? and How do I compile things in a way that adds up to meaning while at the same time keeping the reader’s interest? The problem with the list poem is that it always works, so therefore becomes a type of pyrotechnic. Pyrotechnics are great, but they’re also an obvious and transparent strategy. I worked on this poem for 2 years, arranging and rearranging, adding and subtracting. It’s as good as I can get it. My favorite list poem is Hikmet’s “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved.” It’s so deceptively simple. Reading that poem is what inspired me to write “Coos Bay.”  

AMK: I notice that, particularly in this poem, you seem very much intrigued by hard work; with the toil associated with it and with the sort of personal and social values that come with it.  Is “Coos Bay” a sort of eulogy to hard work?

MM: I never really thought about “Coos Bay” as a eulogy, though I can see why you’d ask. Coos Bay—the town—is a place where people work. I grew up in a blue-collar household, so manual labor was just a part of life—it was never an idea. You get up, you go to work, you get two weeks off once a year. This may sound naïve, but I never realized I was from the working class until I attended a four-year college. In college I met people who had never had jobs and who would probably never get jobs. The singular memory I have of my first day of college is thinking to myself, “These fuckers drive nicer cars than my parents drive!” But hey, what can you do? I’m not complaining. Work and the images of work are who I am. Work has never been a literary theme park for me—It’s what I know and have known, so it inevitably takes center stage in my writing. If I belonged to a different class I’d probably write about my vacation home and my decadent Ouiji board parties. 

AMK: What are you working on now?

MM: I’m at work on three different things. I’m hammering on some new poems that I hope to shape into a book at some point. I’m continuing to translate the poems of Tomas Tranströmer, which has been a remarkably transformative experience. And I just finished editing a book of David Wevill’s essential work titled To Build My Shadow a Fire: The Poetry, Translations, and Prose of David Wevill. I’m a real believer in Wevill’s work. He’s one of these poetry giants who has somehow managed to fly under the radar here in the US. Getting Wevill’s work into the hands of others is one of my missions in life. I won’t rest until it happens.  

AMK: Thank you.

MM: No problemo.