Maryfrances Wagner, former Missouri Poet Laureate, continues to share a poetry of inter-generational
dialogue—among her family in books like Dioramas (Mammoth Publications) and The Immigrants’ New Camera. Her new poetry book, Backstories (Spartan Press), relates poignant narratives about a teacher and her students, based on the poet’s experience. These snapshot poems (see an example below) are intense vignettes that wrap character, emotion, and compassion into unforgettable lyrical form. This is a poet at the height of her powers. I conducted an email interview with her March, 2025.
Denise Low: I love the title Backstories—so
evocative. What do you intend with the title?
Maryfrances Wagner: I think all teachers encounter students with inappropriate behavior in one way or another—from sassy backtalk, to never having supplies, to saying something inappropriate to another student, to not doing homework and talking about it with distain, to fights and more serious infractions. There are also the ones who sit quietly and never participate or turn work in but seem to stew in some sort of self-destruction. I found over time that all these students always had a backstory, a reason why they acted inappropriately to school rules. I was always quite moved by how some students had to live and survive, and it made me realize a good deal about my own false assumptions. The shock of what I discovered made me want to tell their stories because I don’t think most people realize what many young people experience in daily life. I did change names and details to disguise the real people, but the stories are true.
Denise Low: Please tell me about this new book’s structure.
There are four sections, and all poems relate to your career as an English
teacher. How did you choose poems and their order?
Maryfrances
Wagner: The first
section of the book includes early teaching experiences as well as poems not
told as monologues. The next section tries to lighten things up a bit with some
humor. I’m speaking in generalities here, but many sophomores are still
innocent and naïve even if their lives may be awful. They ask unexpected
questions or give answers that show how limited their experience is and how lacking
their knowledge is, and I realized many of them didn’t understand metaphor, idioms,
satire, irony or context. They took things so literally, and often their
understanding of a word’s meaning was way off. Still, there was a charm about
that innocence, and sometimes their remarks were funny, so I started writing
them down. The third section is made up of student monologues. As I mention in
the book, when students committed some kind of infraction, I didn’t agree with
the school district’s step system— the first time is a warning, the second is a
day of in-school suspension, the third three days of in-school suspension, and
after that out of school suspension. I didn’t think the solution to a
discipline problem, unless it was something like a serious fight, was to take a
student out of class, so I asked the principals if I could offer my students
detention instead, and they said if I was willing to stay with them for the
detention, it was okay with them. I usually stayed after school for a while
each day to finalize lessons or plan for the next day, so it was an easy thing
for me to do. Sometimes the students came in and simply spent the thirty
minutes doing their homework, but many of them started talking to me, and
although they didn’t always realize what they were revealing, they were giving
me their backstory, an insight into their lives. The Detention Suite captures
those stories. I taught creative writing fiction and creative writing poetry as
well, and often in those classes, where I created more of a family environment,
students told their stories in what they wrote. I worked some of those into
monologues as well. I could have easily written fifty more monologues, but I
thought I’d given a representational idea of their lives. The final section
closes out the years of my teaching, and the final poems are close to when I
retired. I also managed to parody some teaching methods forced upon teachers
like the Madeline Hunter Model as well as the jargon principals bring to
meetings all teachers basically dread attending. So much educational jargon is
reduced to letters.
Denise Low: As Missouri state Poet Laureate, you have had
many public appearances—and performances of your poems. Have you shifted your
writing to be more performative? Or not? Have there been other influences of
being Poet Laureate?
Maryfrances
Wagner: Those are two
big questions. I’d say yes to the first one. Often my public appearances were
around people who didn’t read and write poetry, and some were fairly sure they
didn’t like it, so I tried to make everything I said and did accessible. I
dodged reading some poems that had layered meanings and perhaps more difficult
to understand if they didn’t regularly read poetry, like the poem “Chapter By
Chapter,” and I stuck with poems I knew they would at least understand if not
find their own way into them, the goal of being a poet for me. I want everyone
to find their way in, their own story in mine. The monologues work well this
way because I can assume the voices of the students or my mother or my aunt,
who were often funny. As to the second question, I’d say that being Poet
Laureate was one of the best experiences of my life. Not so much that I touched
other people’s lives but that they touched mine. I felt zeal so many times when
something connected with them or when they told me how a poem meant so much. I
taught many workshops during that time, and they reminded me of what I loved
most about teaching—that moment when that lightbulb goes off and a student has
a realization or when someone realizes he can do what he didn’t think he could.
I love those moments as I am sure all teachers do.
Denise Low: I appreciate the story in each poem and also
the lyrical intensity. You use both narrative and lyrical techniques. How do
you go about composing your poems, and how do you edit them—what
characteristics do you emphasize as you finalize a poem?
Maryfrances
Wagner: Several people
have called me a storyteller in poetry, but I don’t really think of myself as only
a storyteller. Yes, I am telling stories in this book as well as others, but
I’m still mostly writing a literary poem. I think most of my poems have a
narrative thread, but they do blend the lyric and narrative together. One of my
professors once commented on that and said I was joining two forms, but I
didn’t think that was a bad thing.
What I am writing
about governs how I write the poem. In the cases of the monologues, I have
always kept journals, and I used to write in them more faithfully. I always had
a journal with me at school, and during those detentions, when students started
telling their stories, I started writing down what they said. When I composed
those poems, it was like channeling them, and I could hear them all over in my
head. At other times I think about an idea I want to get across, a point I want
to make, and I build imagery and metaphor that do the work to get that point
across. That’s the general way I write, but as I am sure all writers have
experienced, sometimes starting a poem without knowing where it’s going helps
me see the truth of how I feel about something, and thus, it becomes an
enlightening experience for me. As for editing, let’s say the rough drafting is
the joy part, getting words on paper, those moments of hanging out with the
Muse, but then revision becomes the hard part—making those words better. I revise
over and over, changing images or metaphors that I think are less apt, and I
keep honing and shaping so that those images tell the story and show what I
want to say. My professors always hammered “show not tell,” so I learned not to
tell anything. Sometimes that may be at the cost of not being as clear if
people can’t stack up meaning that way, but it’s what I do. I look at it over
and over for days. Sometimes I change a word. Sometimes I cut a stanza.
Sometimes I rearrange the poem, change an image, add and cut. A poem can take weeks
or months to come to fruition. From there, I often share a poem with someone to
see their response. I envy people who sit down and in one day have a finished
poem. I’ve never done that. When I started this book, I wasn’t writing any of
the poems as monologues, but when I looked back at my journals and saw where I
had written down Brandon Langford’s story (not his real name) almost as he told
it, I decided that letting the students tell their own stories was going to be
more powerful because there was a deeper layer, a deeper story going on, so I
went with many of them that way, but I disguised some things and changed some
details so no one would know who I was talking about.
Denise Low: You include your own collages in the book,
made of word-art, typography, and images. How do you intent them to interact
with the poems?
Maryfrances
Wagner: I love to
collage. The collages in this book are not indicative of the collages I usually
create. Making a collage for me is like the opposite of writing a poem. It’s
like a meditation. I shut my conscious side down and let the subconscious
express itself. It gives, and I put it down. I don’t think about it. The
collages in this book are intentional. One group of them depicts the literature
we read. The first one depicts Lord of the Flies, a book I sometimes
taught in Sophomore English. It’s a book I think is vitally important in
showing how a democracy only works as long as people agree to follow the laws
set down, but envy, greed, and fear can undo what could have been a well-functioning
democratic society. It’s a lesson that never grows old and is even more
relevant right now. Another collage does the same thing with Julius Caesar,
a play most sophomores read, and it has many of the same messages. A third is
around A Separate Peace, a novel I sometimes taught my sophomores, and
it’s a rite of passage book. Some of the collages are words: one is a
collection of all the slang intensifiers students have used over the years, another
is the different kinds of learning techniques teachers are expected to use
until a new way comes along. It doesn’t matter if a teacher believes a different
method works better. We all have to change whether we philosophically agree or
not. The third category of collages shows students interacting with education,
hoping for a future, not sure what we are teaching them will pay off.
Denise Low:
Is there anything else you would like
to add?
Maryfrances
Wagner: It took me a
while to put these stories to paper, and then years after that to collect them
into a book. I wondered if I had the right to tell the stories. I think what I
learned about my students and myself was as important and vital as anything I
ever taught them. They made me a better and more compassionate person. Their
lives made me care deeply, and I thought others needed to hear their stories.
Even though most of us know that not all things are equal and not everyone gets
the American Dream, I think more of us know inequity exists philosophically, by
what we read, by what others tell us, but removed from being involved with that
inequity firsthand. In their daily life they don’t see how others live. I think
being in the trenches with the truth of how some things are has a much greater
impact, one I wish more of us experienced.
Chuck
What are we?
Humans? Animals? Savages?
William Golding –
Lord of the Flies
On the first day
of my first class in a tiny room,
Chuck takes a
seat so close he taps my desk.
Every day a Polo,
dress pants, buttery loafers.
When he looks up,
he flashes perfect teeth. He
stares, makes me
squirm, but does his work. He’s
18. I’m 21. He
doesn’t treat me as his teacher
ready to discuss
Lord of the Flies. Behind his silky
voice and Gucci
shoes, I see his mean. He instigates
fights and whacks
small boys, particularly Juan—
thick
horned-rims, buck teeth, chunky—Piggy if he
stepped from the
book, and he likes order, logic.
He asks
questions, ponders why Jack craves the kill.
The day after
spring break, Juan asks for a restroom pass.
A minute later,
Chuck dips his face close to mine and asks
to call his
mother to bring his lab notes for 4th hour.
You probably
wonder how I fell for that. I let him go.
I heard the story
after an ambulance took Juan away.
Chuck slammed the
bathroom door into Juan’s face over
and over until
his glasses fell off his broken nose
and cheekbone.
Then he plunged Juan’s head
into the toilet.
By the time the gurney arrived, Juan
was unconscious.
Chuck earned his last credits
on Homebound.
Juan’s parents moved to Texas.
A door had opened
into a new darkness. Students
bumped along as
that year loomed shadowy
under the care of
counselors. A quiet spring
of staring into
space. A time of weighing.
Rumors traveled
like vapor, like stories of the beast.
We lived in the
flicker, the tick. Too many stained
dreams. Too many
thoughts about sharpening a stick.
Maryfrances
Wagner’s latest books
are The Immigrants’ New Camera, Solving for X, and
Backstories. Her book Red Silk won the Thorpe Menn
Book Award and an reissue won second place in the Eric Hoffer awards for
literary legacy and finalist for poetry. Co-editor of I-70 Review,
she also serves as President of The Writers Place and chair of the programming
committee. She was Missouri 2020 Individual Artist of the Year and served as
the 6th Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. She is the daughter
of four Italian immigrant grandparents.
