To answer your last question first (and thanks for your questions, by the way) I’ve never assigned my students to eavesdrop. I have suggested it and have even named some places around town where they might be able to eavesdrop without being too obvious. I’m kind of a nosy guy, so I do eavesdrop, often without planning to. In recent years I’ve become something of an Ipod addict, so I might be missing some good stuff.

 

One of my favorite lines I ever heard in a public place—I wasn’t eavesdropping—was in a bar in Fayetteville, Arkansas that I’d never been to before. I was sitting at the bar with my beer and the bartender who was probably about 40 came in and announced to everyone within earshot, “Grandma flew to Las Vegas and got married.” Another time on a bus I listened to a couple in the seat behind me breaking up. They were so matter of fact about it that I was pretty sure this was a routine they went through every few weeks. I’m always telling my students that if they just open their ears and imaginations, they will never run out of things to write about and they won’t have to recycle stories about zombies and vampires and all the pre-made garbage that many of them seem to think are the only things worth writing about.

 

 

 

I’ve become more aware of time’s passing since adopting my daughter when I was 49 and she was 14 months old. She’s almost 6 now, and I find myself wondering every day how it passed so quickly. There’s a line in a song by James McMurtry, one of my favorite songwriters: “It’s a damn short movie, how’d we ever get here?” (I’m probably misquoting a bit). I try not to let time’s passage bother me too much; you have to have a certain amount of optimism to become a parent in one’s 40’s or 50’s. But it is disconcerting sometimes to realize how long I’ve been writing or how long I’ve been at my current job or how long my marriage has lasted when all those things seem so recently in the past.

 

Like anyone, I’d like to slow down the good stuff—the lovemaking, the times when the writing is going well (which is about as close as I come to losing any sense of time at all), time with people I love. One thing I do feel acutely in recent years is how little time I get with friends who live a long distance from me—perhaps a couple of meals at AWP or hooking up for a reading at one another’s schools—and even with friends who live much closer. One side effect of having a small and active child is the increasing amount of time that gets spent on her activities.

 

I’ve been a Buddhist—although not a very good one—for several years and I meditate three or four times a week (I should do it every day), and that does help to make me a bit more aware of the present because every time I open my eyes, I realize that I haven’t been sitting nearly as long as I think I have. That does help make me more aware of how time passes.

 

 

 

I once heard Robert Morgan say, “There’s nothing natural about writing,” and I think this is what he was alluding to. As writers we all witness those moments that we know would make a terrific poem or story or novel. But then something completely mundane diverts our attention and we’re back to worrying about work and getting to the grocery store and trying to remember if we picked up the dry cleaning. So when we write, we’re often trying to string those more illuminated moments together. But the act of writing, I think, also spotlights our lives so that something that seemed perfectly ordinary at the time—an encounter in a convenience store, a homeless guy asking for a dollar—becomes fodder for the writing as well.

 

And as I always tell my students, don’t be afraid to lie. Sometimes our lives just aren’t enough and we need our imaginations as well. But to get back to your question, part of what writers do is discover patterns. When I’m writing and it’s going pretty well, those connections come easily; when it’s not going so well, I have to strain after them. Probably anyone reading my poems would have a tough time figuring out what I do with my time on any given day—sometimes I wonder myself—but they would probably get some taste for my what loves and enthusiasms are, as well as some of my dislikes.

 

 

I’ve been teaching full time since 1990 and all of that time, except for the occasional guest stint at a four year school, has been spent at two year schools, first at a small private church-affiliated school, and since 1993 at Wake Tech, where I will probably be until I retire. When I got my first full time job, I made some rules to make sure that the job did not overwhelm my writing; I vowed never to grade more than two hours a day for instance. Needless to say, all of those rules fell by the wayside, but I have managed to keep the poems coming.

 

I can’t complain or claim that my productivity has suffered as a result of teaching so many classes. I do think that perhaps if I had a smaller load I might have produced more prose. One of my early ambitions was to publish novels as well as poetry, and that hasn’t happened yet. I enjoy writing reviews as well, but every time I agree to take one on, I feel like it’s taking me away from poems. I have wondered sometimes if I am a bit further below the radar than I might have been because I teach at a two year school. I don’t get a lot of invitations to read, come to conferences and that sort of thing. But those things have nothing to do with writing and everything to do with the business of writing, which is the part of this thing I’ve never been good at and don’t have much patience for. But maybe my workload is the universe’s way of making sure I don’t commit too much bad writing. I’m not sure the world is standing on its hind legs waiting for what might happen if I had two hundred fewer papers to grade every semester.

 

I know the review you mean. My initial response when I read that review was to email the guy and explain all the ways he’d gotten it wrong, but I reluctantly refrained. A friend who saw the review read several of the guy’s reviews and told me this deciding a book should be a certain thing based on its title or the jacket copy or his preconceptions about the poet seemed to be his MO. At any rate, it doesn’t seem like a very effective way of writing about poetry or anything else.

 

I’ve been lucky in that the majority of reviews I’ve gotten over the years have been pretty good ones. The biggest danger with a know-nothing review like the one you asked about is that it might keep someone from reading the book. I know writers who claim never to read their reviews, but I doubt I will ever get there. My best advice for dealing with these people is ignoring them.

 

 

 

Flight, of course. Like any kid who grew up in the 60s, I expected to be vacationing on the moon and Mars by now and flying to work with my jet pack. I loved comic books as a kid and never saw the point of being a superhero if you couldn’t fly.

 

If I had a superpower I didn’t pick, it would probably be my already too-developed ability to spot grammatical errors even when I’m not looking for them. Or perhaps my ability to remember the words of really bad songs.

 

 

 

 

Maybe no one would agree, but I found hope

waiting in those late afternoons of the early 70’s

 

when I came blinking out of the theater

into the cellophane dusks of spring, clouds purpled

 

and swollen, bruises dark and about to vanish.

Later I would read that despair hung black

 

and ragged as the smoke of burned houses above

the streets of cities I’d never seen, remaining banners

 

of an undeclared war. But while children who once believed

the gospel of flowers inscribed their veins

 

with bathtub meth, the soft rock anthem that scored

whatever movie I’d just seen gentled the swaying trees

 

into a syncopation that let all I saw soak in the burnish

and glare that was the nearly-preserving amber

 

of day lapping into memory. A whole life, one holding

shapes and possibilities I had not reckoned, was driving

 

in my direction, would come to the curb soon, motor huffing

impatient to be on its way, like the trains throttling

 

through town after midnight, pulling my dreams in their wake.

They would pause occasionally at the station’s platform

 

to let a few passengers, a few bags of this or that get on

or off, huge machines trembling with their insistence

 

on motion. It would take a while to accept

that we walk through most of life like a spring afternoon,

 

seeing too little, remembering almost nothing, memorizing

a few names, a street sign, one face or another

 

for no clear reason. It was the formlessness of the life

to come that offered me hope, that let me, one afternoon,

 

lift an unironic peace sign to the long-haired passengers

of a van blasting strange music, probably a handful

 

of the town’s errant young, home from college to do laundry

and argue politics before filling a cooler with food

 

and driving back for mid-terms. I heard laugher, saw

forked fingers flash back at me, all the proof I needed

 

that my life would embrace me.

Forty years have passed

in the space of an afternoon. I kept walking until

 

I entered again the life actors in movies could abandon

as easily as changing shirts, the life of sons too young

 

for the deeper freedoms of cars and loud music, reckless speed

and grief. The old songs still play in car dashboards,

 

someone is watching one of those movies for the first

or fifteenth time. Dark still rolls from under low branches,

 

unwinds from the cool furrows of hedges. The clouds exhale

day’s splendor and vanish. And a few crazy seeds,

 

errant grains of hope rise in me, unbidden,

to tell me this life, like any other, can either change

 

or remain as it is. And somehow I must learn

how to love the two alternatives equally.

 

 

 

 

 

This is no weather for walking.

Cold webs of drizzle stitch

the blusters of early morning,

but the dog, caught in the failures

of an aging body, whines

to go out at 3 am, at 5.

Coming in from one of those walks,

I flip on the light, find again

a postcard you sent, uncovered

this afternoon while I searched

for stamps.

Because nothing stays

where I put it or think I put it,

I find your occasional cards

tucked in drawers, falling out of books,

words to scan again as the coffeemaker

brews a bad answer to a night

robbed of sleep.

After pouring coffee,

I open your newest book, the one

you inscribed as though you and I

play the netless oddity

poetry has become equally well.

And breathed again the endless dust,

the eucalyptus and lemon

of your native state, a place

I’ve barely visited but believe

I know because I can read.

Once

my wife and I left a hotel filled

with writers to find some lunch.

While we chewed chips and salsa

in the booth of a Mexican restaurant,

we eavesdropped on a table filled

with writing students. When one said

her friend wanted to date a poet,

my wife whispered, “No, she doesn’t”

so fiercely I thought of the mockingbird

in our yard that dives at me, screaming

an intruder from its nest,

and I wondered

if I should take up essays

or science fiction. At a lake

near my house, a place where

I might have walked the dog when

she was young enough to feel

spring rising in her bones,

someone has placed a camera

so anyone who wishes can go

to a web site and watch two eagles

hatch their young.

Each time

I dial in, the screen could be

a postcard, the nest is so still,

the sky so empty. It takes

a special talent to scan

the landscape and love what is not there,

the way we love the unwritten

or half-written poem, the vanished

hangouts of our youth or the way

one girl dreams love for a poet

or her notion of a poet.

Last night,

I read your poem that pretended

it wanted to be a postcard

to Gerald Stern, who might be

recipient of more epistolary poems

than anyone since God. Last week,

in a store stacked and crowded

by second hand texts, I found

a copy of Lucky Life, a book

I had not read since college,

and I spent an afternoon deep

in the prayed-over landscape

of those poems that struggle

in the margin between the woods

and the road, half-civilized

berms where I spent my boyhood.

Many of Stern’s poems might have fit

on a postcard.

Yours will not.

Neither will this one. I will finish

what there is to write this evening

and spend more nights and weekends

adding, subtracting, weaving

into the chaos of this poem

scraps of news, half-memories of walking

the dog when it could still negotiate

steep switchbacks, the free verse

on the back of a card announcing

the engagement of an unseen girl

and her poet. Then I’ll crease it,

send it to the address stamped

in one corner of your card,

imagine its arrival.

I’m good at that.

We’ve all imagined lives

for one another. We’ve all steered

into curves too fast and made

a lifetime’s worth of promises

to the gods of speed and gravity,

different from the ones offered

to the gods of upright walking

and slow reading.

Breathless,

we ask only to be pulled

to safety one last time.

We’ve all studied the wind, wished

across the great distances it covers

across acres of golden dust

for the strength and faith of birds

on their fledgling flights,

and that those of us watching

be forgiven for a moment

the aging bodies, the books

read and forgotten and the little

read once and saved forever.

 

 

 

 

 

As our fins began to grow, the hard

nouns of land softened, the tide-pool

of voices stilled, leaving us prey

swirling in the maw of water’s language.

The small mouths of our gills opened,

and we could dive deep enough to dissolve

cloudy reefs where we once stood.

In shallows,

we chased skimming bands of fish,

slivers of protein, circled

castle-shapes of coral. Jetties of bone

and debris spotted the soft bottom

of the world, testimony to what

did not surface or float.

The further

our sudden appetites bore us,

the less color meant, all scapes

gone black or dim green,

all motion something to devour

or flee.

Water’s gravity,

which has never held the resistance

of wind or gravel allows

nothing of rest, our lives

the eternal present tense

of bodies never entirely spent

or still,

as sound dies

into simple vibration, the blood-memory

of land birth a trace, then less.

But if

a head broke the heaving sky

of our new world and bobbed

in the chopping hills we once called surface,

the hooked angles of words might

return in the glare-blind and bird-cry

of  a place once vital

as legs we are losing any use for.

 

 

 

 

 

Life isn’t like that, one student says,

objecting to the end

of Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral,” how

it leaves the narrator, eyes closed,

between his wife and her blind friend,

everything suddenly unfinished.

Life is just like that, I counter.

Our existence is badly plotted,

a hegira of things unseen and unfinished.

And let us spend a little time

in the gardens and steep landscapes of plot,

the islands where drama roars, where

outcomes lie uncertain, and we cry

for the plain dirt, the dry sandwiches

of our slow-walking lives.

However many of my childhood stories

end with my moving away, waving

from the back of a station wagon

as my father drove us down a street

whose name I was already forgetting,

nothing ends. We live in murals

like the endless canvas backdrops

that once unreeled to give stage plays

a sense of continuity. For my students,

it’s all shootout and car chase

with occasional interludes of porn.

But mostly we are walk-ons,

extras in stories others tell

to roomfuls of strangers who shake their heads

over some kind act or rudeness

we forgot the moment it happened.

From a train window I watched

a woman stumble in her hurry

across the platform, saw the splash

of coins, lipstick, a phone, hairbrush

and paperback book from her purse.

Her face knotted. I was turning

the empty page of my own face away

when she smiled, refusing,

like Carver’s blind man, the role written

for her. Already composing

the next scene, she kneeled

to gather her things, to gather

the story she would tell and laugh.