This interview series features original conversations with folks around the world who are in the thick of literary culture -- the passionate writers, editors, critics, readers, translators, publishers, bloggers, designers, booksellers, poets, performers, journalists, and instructors who are bringing vibrancy and joy to the world of words. More than a rehash of things you have heard familiar names natter on about before, this series will turn its attention beyond the bounds of the usual suspects and the usual issues. This series is committed to a dynamic exploration of ideas, craft, language, literature, and culture with the people who are committing their lives to it. See more interviews here.
Yesterday I saw this man
in the alfalfa field behind my house
who’d dragged his recliner
and a cooler of cheap beer
out to where the sunset
was at its most magnificent
for no other reason except
to kill with his rifle
whatever he could kill
in comfort utmost
And in an attempt
to resist a snap judgment
I thought again of first impressions
and how in Vasari’s version
Cimabue the painter
couldn’t have guessed
that the dirty shepherd boy
seated like my hunter
in a Tuscan pasture
and sketching sheepshapes on stone
would give the world perspective
That's the opening of "Meditations on a Kiss," included in the bracing and beautiful new chapbook Illinois, My Apologies by Justin Hamm (see the complete poem below). I'll be blunt: I loved the book. There is a classical wash infusing this collection of poems, buoyed by melancholy, humor, and haunting landscape. It is a slim book: fifteen poems in all (if you purchase the book, you also get a CD of the poems in audio). The narrative is conjured by reflections glimpsed in shards -- potent and particular images -- which makes the poems' easy cast outward into the expansiveness of myth a dizzying and intoxicating experience.
Justin Hamm grew up in central Illinois, earned his MFA from Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, and now lives in Missouri, where he offers free writing classes to interested residents in the small town of Mexico. His writing has appeared, or is forthcoming, in Nimrod International Journal, The New York Quarterly, Cream City Review, Spoon River Poetry Review, among other publications. His work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize.
In our conversation, Justin discussed apologies, what he's learned about landscape from poetry and stories, a particularly under-rated poet, the difficulty of comprehending multi-genre writers, and obsessions. Deliverance also comes up.
Here we go:
I feel like I want to take the bait that's invited by your collection's title: what do you have to apologize to Illinois for?
First of all, Anna, thanks for giving me a chance to talk about my chapbook. I'm glad you picked up on the sincerity of the title. There's such a tendency toward irony these days that a lot of people probably read it as clever or funny, but it is, in fact, meant just the way it's said. There are plenty of things about Illinois I should have paid more attention to while I was there. But of course when you're younger and you're looking to assert yourself, to be different, you tend to turn away from your everyday surroundings rather than toward them, and in the course of your rebellion you ignore what you shouldn't ignore.
This is an apology on a few different levels. After I moved away from Illinois, I had all these life experiences -- marriage and fatherhood and mourning and the daily grind of getting by -- that happened in a hurry, one after another, and they really made me reflect on the culture of where I grew up. I saw the beauty in the land and the people, and I learned how hard life is for everybody. I fell in love with the Midwest, both the good and the bad. So I'm apologizing for holding myself apart from that for so long, for being judgmental, for not recognizing the depth and the importance of where I come from until I'd left.
There are also deeply personal things bound up in that apology. We all have those things to apologize for, don't we?
And then, of course, there's the guilt associated with, to use a corn-belt metaphor, "harvesting" what I've seen and know for my art. There are poems in the collection that are borrowed from the experiences of others, the pain of others, and you begin to wonder if you have any right to that.
Though you're not in Illinois anymore, you're still in the Midwest, right? What does it mean to you to have left the place you come from?
I'm in Missouri now, thirty or forty miles out of Mark Twain territory in a little town called Mexico. It is still the Midwest, and that's apparent. So there wasn't much of a culture shock coming here five or six years ago. There are subtle differences, of course, but I'm really comfortable. So leaving Illinois for me was more about removing myself physically. Where I see the difference is, I simply don't interact with those surroundings from my past as often, so when I do, I think I pay closer attention to them and they acquire a greater amount of weight for me personally. They had once been my concrete surroundings. Now that they aren't, I feel somehow freer to let them reveal their metaphorical significance. I had to leave Illinois before I could see it as anything besides a literal setting. A collection of cornfields I passed by every day. A family of people I loved and helped and hated and hurt and forgave and asked forgiveness from while just trying to get by. But none of it meant anything. When I first started writing, I never thought I'd write about Illinois at all.
I'm beginning to write what I'd call "Missouri" poems now and then, and those haven't required distance or hindsight: they seem to come more from observation and imagination than reflection.
What have you learned about landscape and place from the poems and stories of others?
The best writers and poets and musicians--and I have to include musicians because they've been so important to me--all show not just the landscape itself but how that landscape shapes the people. There's an old Ray Bradbury story called "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed." It's about as far from my poetry as you can get--a science fiction tale about colonizing Mars after a nuclear war. Yet, the controlling idea in the piece is that Mars molds these people as it sees fit, turning them into Martians whether they want to be Martians or not.
Take Woody Guthrie's Dust Bowl, the grit of Larry Brown's South, Robert Frost's rural New England, Rick Bass's West, Twain's Hannibal, Bruce Springsteen's factory towns or the mythical Heartland of his Nebraska, even George Caleb Bingham's frontier in a painting like"Fur Traders Descending the Missouri" or a really great TV show like Deadwood -- in every one you can sense just how deeply landscape and place affect the people. I don't know if I've "learned" how to do it the way they do it yet, but that's what I want to do.
How and when did you began reading poetry?
The first poems I remember really falling for were the Frost and the William Carlos Williams we read in high school. "Fire and Ice," "Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening," "The Red Wheelbarrow," "This is Just to Say" -- all those poems.
I can remember reading poetry earlier than that -- Edgar Lee Masters and Carl Sandburg in middle school -- and I think my memory of that stuff definitely shaped how I thought about what a "Midwestern" poem should be, but I didn't necessarily like it at the time, though I love it now. But Frost and Williams were the first, and then all the usual suspects that you get in a public school curriculum. I felt like that stuff reached me in a way it wasn't reaching the kids who were just in a class to get an English credit.
Then I had this introduction to poetry and short fiction class my freshman year in college -- the instructor thought I was arrogant and gave me a 'B,' so it's hard for me to admit this, but that class really taught me to love poems and to read them the right way. Some of my favorite poems ever were first introduced to me in that class: "Digging," "My Papa's Waltz," "The Unknown Citizen," "We Real Cool," "Mirror."
I didn't start reading really contemporary poetry until graduate school. I went as a fiction writer but tried to read what the poets liked when I could. The last few years I've tried to learn everything I can about contemporary poetry, and I read literary magazines and the new collections, but I'm still far behind other poets who have been reading contemporary poetry much longer. I'm always learning about well-known poets for the first time when I ought to have already heard of them. The public library in Columbia, Missouri is a huge help. They've got a section of new poetry books, and they seem to know exactly what to purchase, so that's a convenient way to encounter what's new.
But I think I'll always get a deep pleasure out of reading poems from the past. I love classic novels and history and that carries over into my reading of poetry, too.
What are poems from the past that you think are under-rated ... or otherwise less read than they ought to be?
That's a good question, and I'm not sure I'm qualified to answer it. I wish I was knowledgeable enough to be able to advocate for some highly obscure gems, but the truth is, I have no idea which older poems are being read a lot and which aren't, at least in the poetry community. Other poets always seem to know so much more than me that I just assume everybody's reading everything.
On the other hand, if we're talking about the general public, then the answer to which poems are under-rated or ought to be read more is easy: almost all of them.
That said, if I had to pick an underrated poet from the past -- and maybe you were thinking the more distant past than this -- I guess it would be Raymond Carver. Because he's reached such a level of influence as a short story writer, people forget he wrote poetry.
It's interesting that it's difficult for most folks, including avid readers, to simultaneously hold in their mind images of a writer as skilled in different genres, as if someone can be one thing, or another. You mentioned you initially went to grad school for fiction writing ... do you still write fiction, or have you fully pivoted into poetry?
I agree with what you say about how writers of multiple genres are viewed. We separate the work in our minds as if it came from two different writers. I find myself doing this with someone like James Dickey, for instance. Now that I'm interested in his poetry, I forget that he was also the guy who wrote Deliverance. And when I knew Deliverance but had never read his poetry, it was the other way around.
As for where I am right now, I think of myself as a poet. Poetry was my first love as a writer and I sometimes wish I'd returned to it sooner. But I've begun to write a lot of flash fiction recently, and I do still write some longer fiction when time and inspiration converge. I don't force it, though. If I don't write a poem for a few weeks, I get a little out of sorts, and I'll sit down and make myself write one; with fiction, I don't feel compelled to do that anymore. I let it come if it comes.
These days, if I'm going to do a longer prose piece, it's going to be one of those rare situations where a story arrives in one or two sessions. That may change in the future. Maybe I'll feel the nagging pull to write a large number of word-heavy short stories or take a shot at a novel. I certainly do love reading those forms. But right now I find myself most interested in poetry, and also in flash fiction, which has a close relationship to poetry, and because of that I feel willing to work to get a poem in a way that I'm not willing to work to get a long piece of fiction.
If I can't get a first draft of a prose piece in a couple of attempts, it usually dies. And later I end up using it for scrap parts in poems.
As a writer, where do you think you need to go next?
Yesterday I saw this man
in the alfalfa field behind my house
who’d dragged his recliner
and a cooler of cheap beer
out to where the sunset
was at its most magnificent
for no other reason except
to kill with his rifle
whatever he could kill
in comfort utmost
And in an attempt
to resist a snap judgment
I thought again of first impressions
and how in Vasari’s version
Cimabue the painter
couldn’t have guessed
that the dirty shepherd boy
seated like my hunter
in a Tuscan pasture
and sketching sheepshapes on stone
would give the world perspective
Nor I thought
could the everyday whitecollar
know my old man either
by his black fingernails
and his workingclass teeth
which said nothing
of the scope of his imagination
or of the tenderness
that lived in his heart
But Giotto gave us Judas
with the bulldog brow
the perfect mask of hate
bled it onto a panel
and forever turned a kiss
into something profane
which reminded me
that my father once left
the reddish phantom print
of his open hand
below my mother’s right eye
And I sat there
and watched my breath
cloud over the window
and when the gunshot sounded
I couldn’t be sure
if it was really safe
to place my lips on another
human being
Comments