An interview with Eric Pankey
                                       -by Andrew McFadyen-Ketchum

Andy McFadyen-Ketchum: "Four Walls And A Roof" is a poem concerned with the life of the artist and, in this case I’d say, of the poet.  In the first stanza, you claim no fluency with “language,” be that of the heart, the world, or actual written communication.  I love the metaphor of the “screw-head…stripped and no tool I own can turn it;” the image that creates.  I’m reminded of my father who taught me as a child the various ways to solve this problem, but poetry doesn’t really work this way does it?

Eric Pankey: At any given moment, the poet has only the words that he or she can access or muster, only the language that he or she can coax, conjure, wrestle, or lure. What one ends up calling one’s poems are the poems that came closest to being what you could almost hear, almost taste, almost say, yet to one’s self they always fall far short of what one had hoped. I always say that my poems are the poem I wrote and not the poems I meant to write. I do think that any artist is primarily engaged with the medium of that art and its possibilities and limitations.

AMK: Like Macbeth, who draws out the metaphor between life and the stage, this poem seems to say that you feel you have been grabbed by "the forearm onto stage."  This poem also argues that verse is not a collection of poetic devices, i.e. metaphor, sound, image, soul, etc, all of with which you have shown your mastery.  Rather, you claim, poetry is the “wordlessness by which I set down the moment and its / abracadabra.”

It’s funny that you use that word, "abracadabra.".  First, when’sthe last time (or first!) I've seen this word in a poem?!  And second, and more importantly, we teach our students that, No, writing is not a form of magic.  Writing takes time, work, and dedication, but is certainly not a mythic event.

“Abracadabra,” is a word with its own sort of magic isn’t it?  With its own sort of body and sound, separate from some sort of unattainable sorcery?  I think that’s what pulls me so frequently to your work: the layering of language, the compacting of definitions, images, and metaphors…and the use of flourish (abracadabra the word uttered by a magician as he sweeps the white cloth from the table).

So, to my question, is it the poem that brings you to such a state?  Is it poetry that, like a mother and father, provides you with little more than you need: “four walls and a roof?” Or is it a spirituality, a religiosity, that claims you, like “the roof of a sinkhole opened swallowing a / house” that reaches up from some deep place and moves you to song?

EP: Words have always been connected with magic. Those witches in Macbeth speak, of course, in poetry! It is through the spell of language that they cast their influence upon the world.  If we read John’s gospel, it is a word, rather the Word,  that calls creation into being. Is it the laying on of hands that heals or the words spoken by the healer, or some interchange between the two? I don’t know. For me, the poem is a place to investigate, to speculate on, that which I don’t quite know: not a vessel for thought, but a vehicle for thinking.

AMK: My next question concerns craft and form, which I’d be foolish not to ask about considering the “not a lid mis-threaded;” the “nails countersunk.”  The book in which this poem appears, “Reliquaries,” consists of five sections, each of 10 poems, each poem composed of four sections, each section composed of five long lines, which often flow beyond the right margins and thus have the appearance of indented lines.

It’s hard not to think of the Russian matrioshka nesting doll, which, when opened, contains another smaller, identical doll, within which is another smaller, identical doll, within which, etc, etc…

Looking at this poem, we are presented with four different and, yet, almost identical ways of looking at the same moment of verse.  While I would never claim you had the matrioshka doll in mind, and while I would never ask you to “explain” the form of your poetry, it would be interesting to hear your thoughts on how you conceived of this book, this form, and what you think of form in regards to its importance in poetry in general.  Is poetry without form, in fact, “playing tennis without a net?”

EP: I like the idea of nesting dolls and your description of the form of the book, the individual poems, and each poem’s four sections seems apt. The title of the book is RELIQUARIES. I saw each of the fifty poems as a reliquary and I saw each five line section as a kind of relic—of memory, language, things felt. . . held within the reliquary.  What is a relic but something we might have overlook that for our not overlooking is given value, imbued with significance, and even at times, sacredness.

AMK: I want to thank you for your time.  My last question maybe a bit off topic, but I think it’s worth looking into.

I graduated from Virginia Tech in 2003.  You, of course, teach at George Mason University in Virginia, just outside D.C.  I remember making the four hour drive fairly often as an undergrad to GMU because some fool told us there were more girls there than at VT.  I think we were more moved to the trip, to taking to the road, in search of whatever was to be found, female or not.

I’m not going to claim that being four hours from Virginia Tech means you are intimately connected with the events there just a few months ago, but, being a poet, what is your connection to critical events in American…culture…history?  Do you find yourself reacting poetically, or wanting to react poetically when things like Katrina, Virginia, Virginia Tech, or 9-11 occur?

EP: Before I am ever a poet on any given day, I am many other things—a father, a husband, a dog-owner, a teacher, and of course, a citizen. Some of my poems directly confront the moment in history we find ourselves in, for instance, a poem called “History” in ORACLE FIGURES, while other address things more indirectly, for instance, a poem in my forthcoming new and selected poems, called “Between Wars.”  “The world is too much with us,” as Wordsworth argued, “late and soon.” There is no ignoring what you can called rightly “critical events.”