Alvis Minor has an MA in English Literature from the University of Southern California and an MFA in Creative Writing from West Virginia University. He would have had a PhD in Creative Writing from USC, had he gotten around to writing his dissertation. He currently works for the Department of Health and Human Resources in West Virginia, and spends his free time reading, writing, and wishing he had finished that dissertation.---------
Alvis Minor Interview, with Kaite Hillenbrand
These poems and their imagery, language, metaphors, etc., are masterfully subtle, crafted with a deft, delicate hand. It gives them a piercing, poignant beauty that’s simultaneously soft, gentle, and comforting (not always in their depiction of the world, but in their treatment of the reader). I find in these poems an artist, an exceptionally human human, with his arms stretched open to the world for a loving hug, knowing he will receive both love and cruelty (become prey, perhaps) in response. (They make me want to hug you back. Kindness and love should always net kindness and love.) I know it’s too much to ask how you do it, so I’ll ask a question that at least pretends to give you a starting point: Where do you begin?
I always start with doubt, which is a very generative place for me. Most of my favorite poets – Rimbaud, Whitman, Bishop, Dubie, Graham – write with such certainty, such conviction. I tried for a long time to mimic that, but the results were pretty sketchy. I guess it always felt false to me, like I was trying to put my own revelations and epiphanies on some pedestal and say, “Look at this awesome thing I thought.” A lot of poets can pull that off, but for me, the process is a lot more compelling than the product.
So I start with a doubt, and then I figure out how navigate that doubt, how to think through it. What I’m putting on the page, and what I think you’re picking up on when you talk about the “loving hug,” is an invitation. I could think through this doubt all by myself, but where’s the fun in that? My poems are me thinking on paper, yes, but they’re also pulling a reader along with me. And my goal, though I’m not sure this always happens, is to duplicate the thought, the process of thinking, without necessarily forcing any conclusions.
What makes the writing process so compelling for me is that I can start with a question, a doubt, a tiny thought, and it tends to explode and multiply, like all the “infinities of islands, islands spawning islands” Bishops talks about in “Crusoe in England.” Bishop is describing a nightmare, but I sort of like it. And if I’m being honest with myself, I can start with questions of identity or politics or whatever, but underneath it all is my own variation of Cartesian anxiety, a need to really understand the connection between the thought and the world that produced it. If nothing else, the act of putting a doubt on the page is extremely cathartic – once those words are on paper, you are holding a physical object. You can punch it, burn it, kiss it, eat it, or fuck it, whatever helps.
Passing is a pretty much horrible place to be – trying for acceptance, a (false) sense of belonging, by hiding a real, essential, non-harmful part of yourself. By pretending to be what someone else wants instead of you (or at least what you or they think they want). It’s horrifying that a society would ever put anyone in a position where passing is a viable option to avoid even more pain. I love “Tin Creek Bottom, After the Fire” for what I understand to be its condemnation of this and for the resolve in its lines, especially in its final lines. What is the relationship between poetry and passing?
As far as I’m concerned, every poem is a dramatic monologue. Every word has a speaker, and every speaker is a mask.
No matter how personal the genesis of a poem may be, the poem itself is an act of communication. It has to exist for a reader. So all of those elements of poetry we spend so much time analyzing and praising – sound, style, imagery, etc. – are, in a way, attempts at passing. We use them to turn thought into something more digestible.
I think it’s really important to say here, though, that passing takes many forms. Even in “Tin Creek Bottom, After the Fire,” there are two characters who are passing in very different ways. One of them is passing in the way you describe, a passing that is forced on him by society – but the other is simply pretending that he can understand the consequences, that he can bear the loss.
Sound is all through these poems; so are musicians and songs. Some of my best college memories involve coming across you and two of our friends singing in three-part harmony late at night. (I particularly remember listening to you sing the Indigo Girls’ “Ghost.”) What’s your relationship to sound and music?
I love the idea of the traditional lyric, someone actually singing the poem. I realize the lyric’s move from the song to the page happened almost six-hundred years ago, but I still haven’t really gotten over it.
For me, music is about immersion. It wraps you up in an emotion. I’m definitely not a traditional music buff – I don’t know all the hip underground bands, I can’t tell you much about music history, and I never learned to play an instrument. But I feel it. Personally and artistically, that’s the important part to me. As a result, sound and music in my poetry are all about the emotion, about taking a thought or an idea or an image and wrapping it in a feeling. The hardest part of writing is making sure your words and ideas resonate with a reader. Sound is my favorite tool for helping that happen.
I got to see you once in Los Angeles while you were studying at USC. As fellow West Virginians, we lamented the lack of stars visible from L.A. Places like L.A. and New York City have a lot to offer that West Virginia doesn’t, and some people can’t imagine leaving places like that. Still, you and I both ended up back here in Bob Denver almost-heaven, and your poetry strongly reflects the people and landscapes here. What is it that makes this place home, or at least the place you’ve come back to (despite the “almost” caveat to this otherwise heaven)?
If I’m being completely honest, I miss the city. I miss the chaos, the variety, the pure adrenaline of it. I miss the lights and the shows. I miss fetish bars and drag queens (we have the latter here, but rarely in public). And I miss the food!
But West Virginia is home. I’m not sure I can explain my relationship with it any better than that one word. In the city, I always felt like a voyeur. I was always outside of things, always separate. Here, I feel like a puzzle piece snapping into place. My borders get hazy. These mountains are me; I’m part of them.
That said, the “caveat” you mentioned is an important part of my work, I think. I see this place as a huge part of my identity, but I am from (and still live) in a very rural part of the state. As a gay man, as a lover of art and books, as a social liberal, I often feel out of place even here. That comfort/discomfort, love/hate, understanding/confusion is something I deal with quite a bit in my work.
Who do you consider to be your people?
Can I confess something? I’m so self-conscious and socially awkward that I don’t have a good answer for this. I feel like a bit of an outsider in almost any context, and I’d like to pretend that it’s because I’m a quirky rebel just overflowing with uniqueness – but it’s usually because I need to take an Ativan. That said, I have wonderful friends who have learned to overlook my weirdness and love me anyway. Those are my people.
What is one of your favorite pieces of trivia?
Barbie’s middle name is Millicent. She has a Twitter account, by the way, that is hilarious!
What’s something that makes you giggle?
The Nobel Peace Prize. Have you ever seen the actual medal? It has three naked men on it that are almost embracing in the most awkward way possible. It doesn’t look at all peaceful.
What’s your favorite vice; or what do you love that you’re a little embarrassed about?
I have so many… I’m absolutely shameless. Reruns of The Golden Girls. YA fiction. Subversive cross stitch. Video games. 90s grunge music. Celebrity gossip.
You know, I think everyone should read Chekhov at least once. Everyone should see one of Ai Weiwei’s installations. But there’s nothing wrong with some baser indulgences here and there.
---------
Natural Aggression
When the wild dogs cross the wooden bridge over Tin Creek
snapping at nothing and each other, my mother stands
on our back porch, her hair loose from its bun, twisted
down her back, and says this is why these are dog days,
because mongrels go crazy in the heat. She worries
that children could be out still, though it’s dark, so tells me
to get my father. The night is so sticky my clothes cling
to me as I walk to the shed. I think he must be bent under
the hood of our car, rearranging things as he always does
this late, when the day has been unbearably empty,
but the hood is closed and my shirtless father is loading his gun.
Get inside, he says – sad, how he slides the shells into the barrels,
parallel, thick red tubes clicking as they fall into place. Sad, too,
how he steps away from the light of a single, uncovered bulb
and follows the barking of the pack. I sit on the porch swing
with my mother, drinking sun tea as shots echo through the valley.
I wonder if musicians do this, if every song I’ve ever heard
is somehow about thunder. Listen, mother says, and the gunfire
is a chorus – three, five, an uncountable jumble of explosions,
and I imagine every boy on every porch, drinking tea with mothers
as every father hunts the wild dogs. The space I am filling
is finite. One last shot. One yelp. The tea is sweet in my mouth.
Poem
Once the instrument responds (not dreamt,
I guess, but uncovered), we’ll be
out this screen door
bounding over snakeholes: even
lies
know when to cover their mouths.
The instrument is never
quieted. Out by the slate piles, sound
buries its head. It
slips into lunchboxes. Smokes cigarettes
in the sun. Reflects.
I know
it eats fireflies; its belly swells and glows. Even
lies know
we carry some things forever on our backs.
A Shot
The jay is down, scatter
of feathers over tangled wood sorrel –
stillness, sound and
aftermath
are wide, hollow
(barren, then).
Beauty is meat and bone
too shredded to salvage.
I could argue the ground
shifts
beneath your feet. I could tell you
everything, one speck to the next.
I ask you to touch me.
The boy says he is tired of thinking, he wants
just to watch a robin peck the dirt for food –
but look, there’s something with you
and birds.
High school boys knock them from the sky
with slingshots and pellet guns,
and here you are watching
hungry
as they fall.
How It Goes
Put a little boy in the woods
by himself, make it dark, you can’t help
but have a fairytale. And he is here, desperate
to answer the owl when it questions. And then here,
stooping to early morels, prying off their eggplant caps.
(I wake hard – some dream
a breaking wave.)
Come morning, hunting dogs gather
in scripted packs, men in orange hats
close by, slouched into cigarettes
and coffee black in tin mugs. A large woman
resigned to maternity cries some and is soothed.
(The dream is many bodies
and then nothing,
the crushing of bones.)
I sit with Billy on the train bridge,
our flea-scarred legs shaking over the water,
shoestrings stained red and gray. He whistles
some song
(Wild Horses)
and the hounds
roll down the hill, snapping limbs, cracking
the railroad ties that cradle the river.
We have slits of bronze and camphorwood
where our eyes should be – there is nothing
but sound where we sit, just what comes
seconds late, just Billy whistling something new
The Bluest Eyes in Texas
and us dropping gravel off the bridge. The noon
train comes early. We leave pennies on our seats
and follow an old path home.
In the Middle of My Mother
Between the line of sheets like unstable screens
and our storm door, loose on its hinges,
my mother spits the clothespin from her mouth
(I liked it there, the smooth wood against her teeth)
and said she couldn’t see for all the world
how I could say his name
from such a deep place in my throat.
It could have been summer but wasn’t
and the tops of the mountains made hollow breathing sounds,
wind above the valley.
My mother steps from the porch with her basket
of damp sheets, and she is somewhere between angry
and letting her hair loose to the heat. She says
I have the color of her dress wrong, that it’s denim blue,
not that dusty green I loved because it looked like drought grass.
He watches my mother from across the river – far off
and left so I barely see him snapped gone and back by the corners
of the sheets. He is a speck of red rising from the pinpricked gravel road.
I touch the sheets with dirty fingers, smear a trace of myself
through the center. I am waiting for my mother, watching the boy
snap in and out in beats. My mother’s voice slips between them:
He’s a bad day, that one. I hear the sheets hit her basket,
soft breaths like the mountain, like the boy –
and the last light of July breaks against my back.
Tin Creek Bottom, After the Fire
In retrospect,
I see nothing but the whip-thin edge of river – though then
we would have called it
a creek –
and how the dirty water misbehaves
through miles of otherwise innocent shoreline.
I am barely in this scene,
maybe just a passing glance
or a reflection half hidden in shadow,
maybe
the light behind the light, like
lack in lack, an absence
so present
it concedes to you. Better. Better –
Fuck.
I remember how old lumber roads opened to us,
black fields where fire
stumbled through. I know
you were stayed, then, to a particular
mode of passing: an air
of sorts
sifting past the forest ruins, laying claim on half-charred
trailing arbutus,
dutchman’s breeches,
solomon’s seal – a claim
on what is left
of trillium and my body.
So I thought
as you stepped down from the sand
and felt what passing like a breath through this, through now, could be –
I am more than this
and glad the ground is free of flowers.
When the wild dogs cross the wooden bridge over Tin Creek
snapping at nothing and each other, my mother stands
on our back porch, her hair loose from its bun, twisted
down her back, and says this is why these are dog days,
because mongrels go crazy in the heat. She worries
that children could be out still, though it’s dark, so tells me
to get my father. The night is so sticky my clothes cling
to me as I walk to the shed. I think he must be bent under
the hood of our car, rearranging things as he always does
this late, when the day has been unbearably empty,
but the hood is closed and my shirtless father is loading his gun.
Get inside, he says – sad, how he slides the shells into the barrels,
parallel, thick red tubes clicking as they fall into place. Sad, too,
how he steps away from the light of a single, uncovered bulb
and follows the barking of the pack. I sit on the porch swing
with my mother, drinking sun tea as shots echo through the valley.
I wonder if musicians do this, if every song I’ve ever heard
is somehow about thunder. Listen, mother says, and the gunfire
is a chorus – three, five, an uncountable jumble of explosions,
and I imagine every boy on every porch, drinking tea with mothers
as every father hunts the wild dogs. The space I am filling
is finite. One last shot. One yelp. The tea is sweet in my mouth.
Poem
Once the instrument responds (not dreamt,
I guess, but uncovered), we’ll be
out this screen door
bounding over snakeholes: even
lies
know when to cover their mouths.
The instrument is never
quieted. Out by the slate piles, sound
buries its head. It
slips into lunchboxes. Smokes cigarettes
in the sun. Reflects.
I know
it eats fireflies; its belly swells and glows. Even
lies know
we carry some things forever on our backs.
A Shot
The jay is down, scatter
of feathers over tangled wood sorrel –
stillness, sound and
aftermath
are wide, hollow
(barren, then).
Beauty is meat and bone
too shredded to salvage.
I could argue the ground
shifts
beneath your feet. I could tell you
everything, one speck to the next.
I ask you to touch me.
The boy says he is tired of thinking, he wants
just to watch a robin peck the dirt for food –
but look, there’s something with you
and birds.
High school boys knock them from the sky
with slingshots and pellet guns,
and here you are watching
hungry
as they fall.
How It Goes
Put a little boy in the woods
by himself, make it dark, you can’t help
but have a fairytale. And he is here, desperate
to answer the owl when it questions. And then here,
stooping to early morels, prying off their eggplant caps.
(I wake hard – some dream
a breaking wave.)
Come morning, hunting dogs gather
in scripted packs, men in orange hats
close by, slouched into cigarettes
and coffee black in tin mugs. A large woman
resigned to maternity cries some and is soothed.
(The dream is many bodies
and then nothing,
the crushing of bones.)
I sit with Billy on the train bridge,
our flea-scarred legs shaking over the water,
shoestrings stained red and gray. He whistles
some song
(Wild Horses)
and the hounds
roll down the hill, snapping limbs, cracking
the railroad ties that cradle the river.
We have slits of bronze and camphorwood
where our eyes should be – there is nothing
but sound where we sit, just what comes
seconds late, just Billy whistling something new
The Bluest Eyes in Texas
and us dropping gravel off the bridge. The noon
train comes early. We leave pennies on our seats
and follow an old path home.
In the Middle of My Mother
Between the line of sheets like unstable screens
and our storm door, loose on its hinges,
my mother spits the clothespin from her mouth
(I liked it there, the smooth wood against her teeth)
and said she couldn’t see for all the world
how I could say his name
from such a deep place in my throat.
It could have been summer but wasn’t
and the tops of the mountains made hollow breathing sounds,
wind above the valley.
My mother steps from the porch with her basket
of damp sheets, and she is somewhere between angry
and letting her hair loose to the heat. She says
I have the color of her dress wrong, that it’s denim blue,
not that dusty green I loved because it looked like drought grass.
He watches my mother from across the river – far off
and left so I barely see him snapped gone and back by the corners
of the sheets. He is a speck of red rising from the pinpricked gravel road.
I touch the sheets with dirty fingers, smear a trace of myself
through the center. I am waiting for my mother, watching the boy
snap in and out in beats. My mother’s voice slips between them:
He’s a bad day, that one. I hear the sheets hit her basket,
soft breaths like the mountain, like the boy –
and the last light of July breaks against my back.
Tin Creek Bottom, After the Fire
In retrospect,
I see nothing but the whip-thin edge of river – though then
we would have called it
a creek –
and how the dirty water misbehaves
through miles of otherwise innocent shoreline.
I am barely in this scene,
maybe just a passing glance
or a reflection half hidden in shadow,
maybe
the light behind the light, like
lack in lack, an absence
so present
it concedes to you. Better. Better –
Fuck.
I remember how old lumber roads opened to us,
black fields where fire
stumbled through. I know
you were stayed, then, to a particular
mode of passing: an air
of sorts
sifting past the forest ruins, laying claim on half-charred
trailing arbutus,
dutchman’s breeches,
solomon’s seal – a claim
on what is left
of trillium and my body.
So I thought
as you stepped down from the sand
and felt what passing like a breath through this, through now, could be –
I am more than this
and glad the ground is free of flowers.