justin hamm

Sometime in early to mid-2017, my next book, American Ephemeral, will be published by Aldrich Press.  The book will include poems and photographs in black and white. As you might expect, it’s a book of gritty Americana. In it you’ll find grizzled cowboys and mule-stubborn farmers and battered old guitars and trailer park landscapes and my own bleeding heart entire. Can’t wait to get it into your hands.

 

 
 
Hands, Discovered Independent of Body

They spoke in gesture and in low
swinish gutturals, conjuring spells

to aid themselves in the delicate art
of untwining threads of thunder.

At night, clawing the forest floor,
hunting gems to barter for bridges

over this tedious witchwork and on
to fitter feats for hands more often scrubbed.

A heathen’s abandoned house, pig’s
lower jawbone affixed above the threshold

just days before the winter solstice
would arrive to phantom drums.

In the light they turned: a maiden’s hands,
now a woodcutter’s rough hands,

now the truth: two pale, palsified
hands of the already-mostly corpse,

the pungent scent of earthy herbmagic
balled beneath their brittle nails.

Hunting, I was, and cold, when I
shoved inside to find them floating.

They reached out, palms up, as if
to say, Please, boy, please hold us,

and curse me for a fool, I reached out
too, and trembling, I did take them.
 
 
His Majesty

In Father’s orchard I saw him.
He gutted our goat then stooped
and slurped and sucked the gore
and wiped his talons in our flowers.

I saw him twice unscrew his gruesome head
and lay it aside for hours.

And when the new sun lit our trees
and his wet feast was over
I saw him crown and cloak himself again
and turn his thirst to power.
 
 
The Beard

Like a sleeping bear it hung long
and lay sidesaddle as he rode,
a bristly but elegant throw
to handsome up the horse.
This beard was a beastly beard
of its own deep appetites,
starving always and always starving,
and when for food it wished,
this beastly bear beard, it ate.

Some knight might block up
the kingsroad and call out
for a strange foretelling—
Cunning man, call my fate, else
it’s meat I’ll make thee with my blade.
And the beard would rise up
and learn our noble knight
one last lesson in digestion.

Hairy belch. Now the wise one
casting a glamour over the gore
and flesh flecks until he can find
a proper stream for cleaning.
The wind near silent blowing.
The moon so gentle in its rising.
The timid horse trotting,
but only ever-so slightly trotting.

All afraid of what might wake.
All afraid that what might wake
might wake with empty belly.
 
 
*  *  *
“Hands . . .” and “His Majesty” first appeared in Star*Line. “The Beard” first appeared in Strangelet.

Parable — Michael Meyerhofer 

On the morning of the great battle,
the knights woke in such a fuss
that they dressed themselves backwards–
metal first, then cloth, then flesh
and last of all, their organs, hung like
ripe apples from the war-tree.

Well, this is embarrassing,they said,
then saw their enemies had done likewise.
How to fight once you’ve seen
the contents of your foe’s stomach,
the sad obstructions around his heart?

Peace spread across Europe
which lead to boredom, which led
to war. Except the men’s sons rebelled
and war their armor on the outside.

Their fathers gathered on the road
to watch them ride off. The old men’s tears
rusted their insides. Outside,
though, they still looked
as always like they were blushing.

Justin Hamm: It’s a limited perspective, of course, but I figure most folks probably wouldn’t expect a well-established writer of contemporary poetry to also be deep into fantasy. And yet, to anyone who reads your poems, the connection makes perfect sense.  Though most are grounded in this time and place, so many of them display that fascination with history characteristic of fantasy writers.  And in poems like “Parable” the connection is even more obvious.

Can you talk a little about your path to being a poet/fantasy writer, how those identities converge and diverge for you?

Michael Meyerhofer: Sure, glad to! I suppose my interest in poetry comes from the same basic place as my interest in fantasy. Despite being very shy as a kid, I was bursting with curiosity. I had this sense that everything was a metaphor for something else, so it wasn’t enough to know the names and functions of the parts of a cell. I wanted to know WHY they did what they did, and how they got there, because that surely had something to do with how we got here. I think I’ve been fortunate enough to keep my sense of curiosity as I’ve gotten older. I’m genuinely fascinated by science and history, and I love being able to incorporate that into my writing.

Sometimes, that takes the form of a poem about the nature of the atom or some tidbit from Greek history. Other times, I can pattern a fantasy character or event after something I read about that stuck with me. So to me, the gulf between poetry and fantasy doesn’t seem all that great. The trick is just making sure that the work itself is honest. In other words, I want my work to be accessible, fun, and meaningful, NOT pretentious. Using poetry as an example, I’d never want someone to read a poem like Parable then walk away thinking that the author sure knows a lot about armor. Instead, I’d prefer to give people something fun to think about, maybe a new, small way of looking at something, a kind of koan that I probably can’t totally explain myself, with whomever wrote it actually being pretty irrelevant (though I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have plenty of writer’s ego in me).

JH: The first time I read “Parable,” the concept and the execution/language both just slayed me. It’s like a genuine fairy tale–it has that highly particular weirdness–but at the same time it resonates deeply with contemporary concerns. On subsequent reads, I’ve come to appreciate the way the language manages to be both grotesque and beautiful.  I admit it; this is a poem that makes me jealous.

What can you tell me about its origins?

MM: First off, thanks very much! I’m glad you enjoyed the poem. That was kind of a weird one to write because I was just thinking about armor one day, how it’s a layer almost the way skin is a layer, which got me thinking of strata. At the same time, I was probably thinking about the pattern of repeated violence throughout history, how each subsequent generation THINKS it’s rebelling against its forebears but often ends up repeating the same old mistakes. Readers of poetry and fantasy are smart, though, so I knew that stating that history repeats itself would be preaching to the choir, which is boring at best and insulting at worst. I like the idea of reversing stories, reversing layers, whenever possible. So I went back to the idea of strata, turned it on its head, and… well, “Parable” is what I ended up with.

JH: The poem, in miniature, contains a mixture of magic and grittiness that characterizes some of the best fantasy writing, stuff like George R.R. Martin’s ASOIAF, which I know we both love. Can you talk about this mixture in the poem? Does that style apply to Wytchfire as well?

MM: Martin’s been one of my heroes for a long time, mainly because he writes fantasy that focuses on character development. I think what keeps him honest is that he keeps things gritty and realistic, no matter how fanciful some elements may appear.  That’s something I try to emulate because I love the sheer, imaginative freedom that comes with fantasy, but I think that kind of wildness is most effective when it has a driving purpose behind it. I’ve tried to maintain that balancing act in Wytchfire by offering characters that I hope readers will find exciting and unique, while still using this new, invented world to say a little something about our own.

JH: One question I like to ask poets I admire is what they hope their poem will do when it gets out into the world. I’d like to ask that of you, as well, but I want to modify it. Do you have different expectations for what a poem will do when it gets out into the world as opposed to what you hope your fiction will do?

MM: Good question! Whether it’s a poem or a novel, I hope first and foremost that it’ll be enjoyed. If people get something deeper out of it, that’s fantastic. Beyond that, I suppose there are some definite differences between my hopes for poetry versus my hopes for fiction.

Poetry has a smaller audience, so frankly, the goal (beyond self-expression, and the thrill of being part of what Whitman called the powerful play) is that published poems will lead to more recognition, which (hopefully) bears fruit in the form of more poetry books, and maybe somewhere down the line, an editing and/or a tenure-track teaching gig.

With fiction, the hope (beyond the pleasure of writing and having one’s work enjoyed) is similar in that you want recognition and sales, of course, but you’re also trying to connect with an audience that isn’t necessarily affiliated with a major university. With poetry, you give readings here and there, which is a lot of fun, but a bit different from the interviews, book signings, and social networking plugs that go with fiction (which are maybe a bit more commercially-minded, I suppose, but can be just as fun).

JH: Last one, Michael. What are you working on now?

MM: Ha, I probably tend to try and spin too many plates for my own good. Right now, I’m polishing the sequel to Wytchfire, tentatively titled The Knight of the Crane. I’m also about halfway through the rough draft of the trilogy’s conclusion, tentatively called The War of the Lotus. I also have a completely different fantasy trilogy and a stand-alone novel I’m working on, a little bit at a time. Meanwhile, I’m always working on poems here and there, when I find time. I have two book-length poetry manuscripts looking for a home. Finding time to submit stuff is practically a full time job in and of itself, though, so I’ve been backlogged with manuscripts for quite a while.

Thanks again for your thoughtful questions… not to mention your badass poetry!

#  #  # 

Michael Meyerhofer, author of Wytchfire, grew up in Iowa, where he learned to cope with the unbridled excitement of the Midwest by reading books and not getting his hopes up, Probably due to his father’s influence, he developed a fondness for Star Trek, weight lifting, and collecting medieval weapons. He is also addicted to caffeine and the History Channel. Michael Meyerhofer’s third poetry book, Damnatio Memoriae, won the Brick Road Poetry Book Contest. His previous books of poetry are Blue Collar Eulogies (Steel Toe Books, finalist for the Grub Street Book Prize) and Leaving Iowa (winner of the Liam Rector First Book Award). He has also published five chapbooks: Pure Elysium (winner of the Palettes and Quills Chapbook Contest), The Clay-Shaper’s Husband (winner of the Codhill Press Chapbook Award), Real Courage (winner of the Terminus Magazine and Jeanne Duval Editions Poetry Chapbook Prize), The Right Madness of Beggars (winner of the Uccelli Press 3rd Annual Chapbook Competition), and Cardboard Urn (winner of the Copperdome Chapbook Contest). Individual poems won the Marjorie J. Wilson Best Poem Contest, the Laureate Prize for Poetry, the James Wright Poetry Award, and the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry. He is the Poetry Editor of Atticus Review. His work has appeared in a number of journals including Ploughshares, Hayden’s Ferry Review, North American Review, River Styx, and Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine.

The Whaler’s Wife — Cindy Hunter Morgan
New Bedford, Massachusetts, 1871

She married the captain of a whale ship
though others warned her not to,
and when he left for the Western Arctic
on a bark with a reinforced bow, a brick hearth,
and five whale boats,
she laced her corset,
felt the baleen stays tighten and press against her,
the bones of another creature
contain what she could not:
flesh, fear, and sadness.
She vowed to wear the stiff undergarment
until her husband came home,
told other wives
the carcass of what her husband sought
was hidden next to her bosom.
Four years passed, snow fell and melted,
news of shipwrecks and squalls came
and came again,
and still she wore the corset,
wore it to market, to tea, to church,
and did not notice the stains,
the weakened fabric, the stench,
the slow fusion of bones.
She stopped eating squash and beans,
bought only cod, herring, and salmon,
and spent afternoons soaking in tidal pools.
When her husband returned,
he found her gutting a seal,
singing something he could not name.
He wrapped his arms around her and felt only bones,
rib bones, whale bones, clavicle and scapula.
That night, he unlaced the corset,
watched linen disintegrate in his fingers,
saw how whale bone had fused with rib bone,
and searched for something that was purely hers.
She shook her head and said,
I am not what I once was.
He cursed his absence,
told her he would make amends,
spent four years pulling baleen splinters
out of her ribcage, scraping barnacles
off the soles of her shoes,
waiting for her to return to him.
 
Justin Hamm: I’ve said before that your The Sultan, The Skater, The Bicycle Maker is my favorite chapbook of all time. It’s forty-four pages, but it feels enormous because the poems make giant leaps in time and place. I think maybe another reason it feels heftier than its physical size is that poems like “The Whaler’s Wife” carry the strange, hypnotic, timeless aura of authentic folk tales. It feels rooted in a deep tradition, though I couldn’t say which one.

What are the antecedents to this poem? What were you reading or thinking about at the time it was written?

Cindy Hunter Morgan:  Thank you, Justin.  Your question is interesting to think about. Imagination and empathy are important in all of these poems. They are antecedents, in their own very general ways. Any specific antecedents to “The Whaler’s Wife” are probably things I soaked up and stored somewhere. Maybe Moby Dick was at work inside of me. There is that chapter early in the book when Ishmael enters a chapel and finds a congregation of sailors’ wives and widows. He reads the marble tablets, engraved in memory of dead whalers, and observes women who seem to wear unceasing grief. He watches the worshippers and notices how they sit apart from each other, “as if each silent grief were insular and incommunicable.” I think the insular quality of grief is important in this poem. Grief separates the whaler’s wife from ordinary life. She starts soaking in tidal pools and gutting seals. Things get pretty weird. I think, now, of a line from Chris Marker’s film Sans Soleil: “madness protects, as fever does.” It’s interesting to consider…

JH: Obviously the motives of the characters in this poem are rooted in reality. But the language, as in many of the poems in the collection, flirts with or hints at magical realism. “The Whaler’s Wife” is one of the poems in the book where I feel the distinction between magic and reality is least clear. I always wonder if we are meant to see the fusing of the corset and the ribs as a purely physical result of overwear or if something more mystical has occurred. Is this intentional? Is something magical at work or no?

CHM: It’s quite intentional, and I think in this case what is happening on a physical level is certainly happening on a mystical one as well. In fact, I think we have to believe in something magical to accept the physical fusion. One of the things I admire about magic realism is the way it straddles two worlds. It’s rooted in the world we recognize, but there is something of the fantastic, something of the fabular, at work. That taut balance between the real and the unreal fascinates me. I think it requires more from a writer — and more from the imagination — than pure fantasy or science fiction. Almost anything goes in those genres, but I like the constraint of keeping something reeled in. I also believe magic — subtle magic — can reveal a deep truth about what is real.

JH: I want to ask a couple of practical questions. Tell me a little about the physical act of composing this poem, or, failing that, a little about your process in general. Longhand in an armchair? Tapped out image by image on a laptop? And how many revisions do you figure “The Whaler’s Wife” went through? Were there challenges you can recall?

CHM: All of my poems start out longhand, in a journal. I’m a little particular about my notebooks. I don’t like spiral bindings and I do like to admire the cover (plain is fine). I generally don’t finish a poem in the journal. At some point I move to the computer, but I only bring a poem there if I sense the poem is going to work. The longhand process is where/when/how I figure that out. I don’t know just how many revisions I had for this poem. I did fiddle, some, with the husband’s response. In one version I had him running to the wharf and taking an ax to the bark, but that seemed a little ridiculous. In another version he bought his wife a new dress, but that seemed dull and predictable and insufficiently complex. There also was a version that involved rats. I can’t remember what the rats did. I think they ate the bones. The challenge I felt was mostly in the rendering of the wife’s crazed longing, and in the rendering of the husband’s response. What kind of patience would he have for her? She is unraveled by his long absence. To what extent are we sympathetic with that, and to what extent is her madness a kind of betrayal, a kind of impatience? Should he meet her impatience with patience?

JH: When you send a poem like this out into the world, what do you hope it does for people? What does writing it do for you?

CHM: I hope this poem helps people travel outside of themselves and deeper into themselves. Of course, I hope that for all poems. This poem, clearly, has a strong narrative quality. There is a story to enter. I’d like to believe the poem delivers a reader somewhere …that a reader begins the poem in one place and finishes the poem feeling elsewhere…maybe in some new emotional territory, though that place is not for me to define. 

There is a Word file on my computer called “poems i love,” and when I read something that knocks me out, or inspires me, or makes me jealous or giddy, I try to add it to the file. For me, there is something powerful and instructive in typing a poem you wish you’d written. And when I get to that point where I begin to question my choice to dedicate so many hours to reading, writing, and publishing poems, I open up that file and read a handful of poems there, and I’m invariably reminded of all the powerful things poems can do.  It’s like a personal anthology or maybe my very own poetry jukebox.

When I can get permission and access to the poet, I’m going to reprint some of those poems alongside a brief conversation. I hope you enjoy.

# # #

The Old Film — Jim Valvis 

Because I’ve seen this film before
my mind wanders and I think
how everyone in the movie is dead:
debonair leading man, gorgeous starlet,
uptight comic spoil, and even the little girl
and her dog, all resting somewhere under dirt.
I’m sitting with my wife and daughter
and we were having a good time,
so I don’t understand why these thoughts
fill me with such sudden sorrow.
Possibly it’s the many troubles in the movie
now seem trivial, all entanglements
long ago coming to nothing. Even the baby
in the crib pushed down clean sidewalks
is at best so old he can no longer feed himself.
I flinch when the camera moves in
for a close-up of the starlet,
who on celluloid remains everything a man
could hope to hold, but in reality
is decayed flesh and white bone whose kiss
would make you vomit.
Unable to keep watching, I go outside for air.
While I suck sky, inside I still hear
my wife and daughter laughing—
and who can blame them? They’re normal.
Morbidity isn’t ruining things for them.
Two breaths and I’m almost sane.
I decide I’m silly, making a lot out of nothing,
and I should head back inside.
But when I turn I see my wife knitting,
my little girl eating popcorn,
the two starts of my life framed in the window
like a screen that’s one click from going blank.

Justin Hamm: Jim, thanks for giving me a chance to feature “The Old Film.” I have a Word file on my computer full of poems that have moved me profoundly or taken root deep in my head over time, a kind of private anthology that I return to when I’m down and having trouble remembering why I or anybody else would even want to write poetry anymore. Your poem is there because it leaves a startling impression of what it is really like to be human and temporary, and to know it.

You’re probably the most prolific writer I know. What, if anything can you remember about the origins and composition of “The Old Film?”

Jim Valvis: Generally speaking, the genesis of a poem is a mystery to me and any attempt to reconstruct it involves a little mythologizing, making more rational that which is not completely rational, giving facts that may have come before or during or after the initial drafting process, but I will do my best to talk about it.

When I want to work, which for me is every day, I sit down, open a new page, and search for an edge of an idea that I can start pulling toward me, preferably in a dramatic way. That edge this time might have been that over many years I had begun to notice something strange about our generation—that we are the first people to watch movies or listen to old-time radio broadcasts or watch the early newsreels where all the actors, even the youngest, are no longer with us. This strikes me as a more serious disturbance than with characters in books. True, everyone in Moby Dick is long dead, including the whale, but in print form it doesn’t seem to matter much. You get carried off to sea and there you are. In movies we see not just the character but the actor, who had his own existence aside from the character, a person who is now dead but is still on the screen moving, talking, loving, a ghost who can do nothing at all but say the same lines again and again, follow the same inevitable course to its settled conclusion, like some extreme Calvinist version of determinism or maybe Nietzsche’s Eternal Recurrence of Same Events.

Anyway, I must have commented about this to my wife a dozen or so times, and each time it was met with a polite shrug, a c’est la vie, which is probably the normal and sane way of dealing with these things, but in my warped imagination these thoughts began to coalesce, began to take on a darker edge and meshed with my struggles to deal with impermanence, especially the impermanence of love and those I love and, let’s face it, myself. Add into this the fact that for years I’ve suffered from panic disorder and I composed a scene that may not have happened exactly but did piecemeal.

“The Old Film” is one of those few poems I kept multiple drafts for. The general outline was right from the start, but I couldn’t hit the language right, the final lines, the kick I look for at the close, the snapping shut of a verse that will leave the reader feeling resonance. It was rejected several times, probably rightfully so, and in fact never was published in a magazine and is one of the poems that is exclusive to my poetry collection How to Say Goodbye. But you’re not the only one to name it as a favorite from the collection.

JH: That image of the actress’s corpse is terrible and jarring in its truth and accuracy, just the sort of irrational and yet not-quite-really irrational image that would feed a moment like this. And I felt those intakes of air meant to calm the speaker, too.

I admire the way you can create such a vivid and emotional experience for a reader out of ordinary language, stuff that can be understood. Can you talk a little about your thoughts on language and how they might pertain to this poem?

JV: Language for me doesn’t mean what other poets generally mean by it. I’m not talking about the use of fancy imagery or metaphors and other things like that. In fact, I’m deeply distrustful of them. I feel sometimes when I read poetry I’m reading an enhanced version of language that has become grotesque. Like a woman with surgically enhanced breasts so large she can hardly stand up straight, these poets jam in imagery as if the parts of a poem matter more than the whole. In fact, whenever someone compliments me on a specific image, I wonder if I made a mistake including it (or not working hard enough on the rest of the poem), because no part of a poem should be stronger than any other part and if one part is then it’s distracting. Like a white picket fence where one picket is painted black, the eye is drawn to the black one and away from all the other pickets. Not a big deal if it’s a fence. It is a big deal if it’s a poem.

What I mean by language instead is something akin to voice, but again I have to throw out a caution because when you speak of voice people think you mean you have some monolithic tone or kind of diction that you rinse each and every poem in. The Hemingway voice, etc. That’s not what I mean. By voice I mean the language is, for that poem, internally consistent and no part stands out or feels out of place, that the reader goes through the work without ever stopping either to find fault or praise, since both are equally damaging because both corrupt the reading experience and stop the flow of reading.

This flow is much harder to achieve than many non-writers realize and can be lost with a single poorly chosen word or a favorite but off-center phrase. This is why Faulkner said to kill all your darlings, but it’s not enough even to kill the darlings. You have to hire the right word for the right job at the right moment. You may prefer the company of doctors, but he’s no good to you if the toilet’s clogged up and you need a plumber. And the end result is to have a beautiful and strong house, not to impress your friends with the company you keep.

Anyway, in “The Old Film,” I worked long and hard (over months) to get the language right. One tricky moment was when the narrator goes outside and has to “suck sky.” I struggled over that phrase a long time. You see, it’s odd diction, the kind of thing I was talking about earlier, the kind of weird phrasing that makes a person stop, and yet it does everything I want it to do. It not only gets him breathing but gets him breathing up, as if his head is tilted back and he’s breathing in not just air but sky. It stayed, but only after fighting with myself about it over several drafts. Phrases like that can drive a poet bonkers as he struggles to determine whether to keep or change.

JH: Thanks for taking the time to talk about “The Old Film,” Jim. One more question. Above, you consider the poem from a craft perspective. Now I’m going to ask you to consider it from a personal perspective. What, if anything, does writing a poem like this do for you? And when it gets out into the world, what do you hope it does for the readers who find it?

JV: I’m not sure what writing any individual poem does for me. I wrote my first short story in the second grade and was probably composing them in daydreams before that and so I don’t have a time in my life when writing was not integral to the way I go about living. But when I write a poem my mind is entirely on the poem, on making it say something, on communicating. I suppose there’s a therapeutic value, but I don’t write for therapy. I read for therapy. I think it’s very tough to talk and listen at the same time and listening is where I find my greatest comfort. But I feel some obligation to do my part in the great conversation that mankind has been having. If I can earn my nosebleed seat at the great theater of the poetry where folks like Shakespeare and Dickinson are seated in the front row, then my poems have given me more than enough and probably more than I deserve.

What I hope the reader gets is a more interesting subject. Often it varies from poem to poem, but in all my poems I am aiming for the universal, something that reaches across whatever lines divide us into that spark of humanity that we all share.

Not too long ago I came across an opinion piece by a famous editor and poet who said that in order to make poetry popular again (as if it ever was) we needed to become far more in-your-face political. We needed more activism, he contended, not more art. I feel he couldn’t be more wrong. We already get plenty of that crap from every other medium in the world, novels, movies, news channels, blogs, internet memes, you name it, all hammering home a political viewpoint, and if all poetry has to offer is more of the same it doesn’t have much to offer at all. I think people hunger to hear words that connect us, rather than divide, and poetry can do that in a compressed fashion; poetry can bridge disparate human beings and find the common spark in all of us. Too many people profit off hate, off division. I don’t want to do that. You ask me what I what I hope my poems do for readers? I want someone of any gender or race or politics or religion to read my poems and think, “Yes, that’s how it is with me too. Thank God I’m not alone.”

And if I can’t do that, then I like to make people laugh. There’s not enough of that either.

# # #

James Valvis is the author of How to Say Goodbye (Aortic Books, 2011). His poems or stories have appeared in journals such as Arts & Letters, Barrow Street, Natural Bridge, Rattle, River Styx, The Sun, and many others. His poetry has been featured in Verse Daily and the Best American Poetry website. His fiction was chosen for the 2013 Sundress Best of the Net. In 2014 he was awarded a King County 4Culture Grant for the Arts. A former US Army soldier, he lives near Seattle with his wife and daughter and too many books.