Denise Low Interviews Maryfrances Wagner, Former Mo. Poet Laureate

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 4^th 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 6^th Missouri Poet Laureate 2021-2023. She is the daughter of four Italian immigrant grandparents.

From Denise Low: See you at the Associated Writers & Writing Programs Conference March 27-30!

DENISE LOW INTERVIEWS DAVE SETER, SONOMA COUNTY POET LAUREATE

 Dave Setter is a rare poet who combines training as a scientist and a poet. As the new Poet Laureate of Sonoma County, a region about as big as Rhode Island, he presents readings and workshops in Santa Rosa, Sebastopol, and we have plans for an event in Healdsburg. His well-received book Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) shows his original voice, shaded by the odic tradition of classical Greek-influenced poets, with narrative threads that remind me of the best West-influenced storytelling. Mammoth Publications is honored to present a chapbook (28 pages) of his new works, Somewhere West of the Mississippi.

DL: What are the main themes in your new book of poetry Somewhere West of the Mississippi (Mammoth Publications, 2025)?

DS: I explore the myth of the American West versus the reality of the American West; the abuse, and resilience, of the natural world; and the hope that the human species may play a part in healing nature while healing our collective soul.

DL: How does this new chapbook differ from your earlier books?

DS: While the ecological focus is similar to that of my full-length collection (Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections 2021), in this book I offer a more unfiltered view of the mine reclamation projects I led as a government official. There was a definite silencing of science during certain periods of our recent history, which led to fear of retribution for speaking out in public. I have also included a few experimental poems in this collection which explore topics difficult to relate in a purely narrative form. For example, I envision inhabiting a soybean plant killed by pesticide drift, wondering what it would be like to die a slow death.

DL: How does the title represent the book?

DS: This chapbook and my earlier chapbook (Night Duty) are both titled as subtle references to our movie culture. Many of the poems are documentary in nature. Night Duty is composed of film noir-style poems. Somewhere West of the Mississippi is composed of poems intended to create a sweeping vista of human experience in the American West within the context of its ecology. I wish the chapbook had an accompanying soundtrack, which is always a feature of the American Western.

DL: I love that, as soundtracks accompany us in so many contexts, since invention of ear buds! You have a background in science—how does that affect your writing?

DS: The language of my poems is, in many places, scientific. When I use scientific terms I try to place them in a context that makes them understandable to the general reader without “dumbing down” the science. I’m also uniquely positioned to offer a rare view into the inner workings of how environmental cleanups happen, their successes and limitations.

DL: The poems remain lyrical and balance facts well. You have been appointed Poet Laureate of Sonoma County. What do you plan to accomplish with this community honor?

DS: Because I self-identify as a poet of the ecology, or eco-poet, in the second half of my two-year term I intend to craft a series of nature writing workshops. Those workshops will be based on 17^th Century Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō's concept of Zōka (the transformative power of nature). But for the first half, I have decided to challenge myself as well as other Sonoma County poets to write documentary poetry. Documentary poetry has no formal, fixed, definition, but generally calls attention to some injustice witnessed or heard of by the poet. One of the keys to writing a good documentary poem is to research facts about the injustice to add dimension to the poem.

DL: I appreciate your focus outside your ego while still using your experience and expertise. Anything else you would like to add?

DS: I want to thank Mammoth Publications for believing in this project. As Sonoma County Poet Laureate, I wanted to work with a small publisher in Sonoma County. Mammoth is that and more, a small publisher located in Healdsburg, California, with a compelling catalogue of impactful literature.

What My Uncle Is Trying to Say

Photos are silent but something’s said

the way his fur hat tilts down

and jacket hangs open even though

bare trees say cold and the windshield

of the Ford LTD publishes an icy scrawl.

Experts can tell the model year by the grille.

The license plate says Minnesota.

Crystals on the plate and on the lakes,

crystals in the air, ready to fall.

With low pressure snow will arrive

on the doorstep. Open the door.

This photograph is nothing.

He will charge inside like a ghost.

DAVE SETER, Sonoma County Poet Laureate 2024-2026,  is a poet, nature writer, reviewer, and essayist. He
authored the poetry collections Don’t Sing to Me of Electric Fences (Cherry Grove Collections, 2021) and Night Duty (Main Street Rag, 2010). Educated as a civil engineer, he writes about social and environmental issues, including the intersections of the built world and natural world. His poems have won the KNOCK Ecolit Prize and received third place in the William Matthews competition. He is the recipient of two Pushcart nominations. His poetry book reviews have appeared in Cider Press Review, Poetry Flash, and Tupelo Quarterly. He is also studying Lithuanian and has translated poems by contemporary Lithuanian poets into English and published them in literary journals. He has been an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts, and has served on the Board of Directors of Marin Poetry Center. Seter earned his undergraduate degree in civil engineering from Princeton University and his graduate degree in humanities from Dominican University of California.

A Quick Guide to the NBCC Poetry Longlist 2024

 For the first time, National Book Critics Circle is sharing its long lists for their annual awards,

Kenze Allen

including poetry. This year’s stellar works show the range and depth of United States poetry at this time in history. Please share with me these exciting works by reading about them and supporting the individuals and their presses by purchasing copies. I have some personal and quoted notes to share:

 An Authentic Life by Jennifer Chang (Copper Canyon): Poet and scholar Jennifer Chang was born in New Jersey. She earned her MFA and PhD from the University of Virginia and teaches at the University of Texas at Austin. Other books are The History of Anonymity (University of Georgia Press, 2008), and Some Say the Lark (Alice James Books, 2017). Her lines are taut, dramatic, progressions through multiple timelines. Her press writes, "Poems navigate wounds opened by explorations of family and generational trauma, and draw on the author’s experiences as a mother, as the daughter of immigrants, and as a citizen of our deeply divided nation.” 

Cloud Missives by Kenzie Allen (Tin House): An Indigenous Nations Poets fellow of the first year, Kenzie’s debut book combines historical texts and lyric works to create response to her Haudenosaunee descendancy. She creates new forms to hold together the histories, maps, and emotions. Not to be missed. From her press: “Like an anthropologist, Kenzie Allen reveals a life from what endures after tragedies and acts of survival. Across four sections, poems explore pop culture—the stereotypes in Peter Pan, Indiana Jones, and beyond—fairy tales, myths, protests, and forgotten histories, before arriving at a dazzling series of love poems that deepen our understanding of romantic, platonic, and communal love.”  

Consider the Rooster by Oliver Baez Bendorf (Nightboat): This native Iowan now lives in the Rockies. During Covid, he resided in Michigan, and, according to his press, “a neighbor in Kalamazoo, Michigan threatens to call the police after discovering the author’s pet rooster. The rooster sounds the alarm and our author wakes to revolutionary transformation.” His stand as a queer poet informs the works of change and chance.

A Gaze Hound That Hunteth by the Eye by V. Penelope Pelizzon (University of Pittsburgh): Global travel informs this book of lyrics and the odd-side role of the commentator/poet on journeys outside “normal.”

Instructions for the Lovers by Dawn Lundy Martin (Nightboat): This poet and essayist has established credentials plus is a professor at Bard. Her press describes the book: “Martin creates a poetic field dense with thought, image, and sound as she reflects on her relationship with her mother, experiences of queer polyamory, lesbian sex, and the racist conditions within the dying American university system.”

The Palace of Forty Pillars by Armen Davoudian (Tin House). Another Tin House entry to the list Armen’s work is based on Iranian architecture. From his website: “In Isfahan, Iran, the eponymous palace has only twenty pillars, but reflected in its courtyard pool, they become forty. This is the gamble of the book’s twenty poems: to recreate, in art’s reflection, the image of a lost home.” I had a chance to talk with him about the book last spring, and I immediately thought of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities—how we create structures in our personal and collective narratives. He is working on a Ph.D. at Stanford, and he is a poet I am following for his vision, for his connection of personal to collective destinies.

Scattered Snows, to the North by Carl Phillips (Farrar, Straus and Giroux): This veteran poet has been a north star for over a generation. He has won the Pulitzer and written 17 books. His works demands respect for their solid and lyrical energy.

Sturge Town by Kwame Dawes (W. W. Norton): Kwame contributes to his communities by editing the African series of poetry for the University of Nebraska Press. This book returns to his native Jamaica, to one of the free towns founded after emancipation in Jamaica. Postcolonial life. Music traditions and visual art poems are threaded among the themes.

Wrong Norma by Anne Carson (New Directions): Anne’s works are always perfectly balanced, inventive, and wise play with the language. About these prose poems the poet writes: “Wrong Norma is a collection of writings about different things, like Joseph Conrad, Guantánamo, Flaubert, snow, poverty, Roget’s Thesaurus, my Dad, Saturday night. The pieces are not linked. That’s why I’ve called them ‘wrong.’”

Yard Show by Janice N. Harrington (BOA): Originally a librarian, Janice Harrington turned to poetry in the 1990s. She writes about the Southern origins of her family and Black Americans in the Midwest. Critic Johnny Payne writes of this book: “As witness of this exaltation of the gaudy, the poet reclaims kitsch as a redemptive force, a vital stream of art, when it is mindfully connected to a set of local traditions, the heritage of a group that had to strive hard to find its native expression using the materials at hand.”

PRE-ELECTION JITTERS: CALM DOWN WITH A HORATIAN ODE

Art Beck (Dennis Dybeck) has given me permission to reprint his excellent translation of this ode by Horace. This might help us keep perspective as we await the momentous election. Art's latest book of essays A Treacherous Art, about translating poetry, is highly recommended! In this ode, I like how he renders "Carpe Diem" at the end.

*****************************

Horace, Odes Book I, 11

Leuci - please, bright mind - don’t ask -

we’re not supposed to know

how it’s going to end - not me,

not you. Don’t listen to fortunetellers.

Believe me, it’s better

to take whatever comes,

as it comes. Whether there’s more,

godwilling, whether this is our last winter

shattering the Etruscan Sea on those crumbling

rocks across: be wise.

Decant the wine, trim your endless

yearnings to fit the short hours.

While we’re talking, jealous time’s

running out - on us. Grab today. Believe

as little as possible in tomorrow.

translated by Art Beck

Univ. of Az. Press Publishes Denise Low: House of Grace, House of Blood

I'm happy to announce this week's publication of House of Grace, House of Blood from the University of Arizona Press, which explores intersections of archival artifacts and the personal, with focus on an incident of Indigenous genocide. The book responds to a rich archive: oral and written accounts, maps, dances, and archaeology about the Gnadenhutten, Ohio, massacre of Indigenous people by renegade Revolutionary soldiers. Benjamin Franklin commented on this tragedy as well as the Shawnee leader Tecumseh. The book's arc follows a sequence of consequences, including deforestation, diaspora of Delawares, restoration, stereotyping, and continuance of traditions and spirituality. Please contact the press for desk and review copies. Please note these appearance opportunities:

Oct. 19, Sat., Washington DC, Politics & Prose, reading with Christian Teresi and Jason Schneiderman, 6 pm, 1324 4th Street NE, Washington, D.C. 20002, (202) 544-4452 http://ww.politics-prose.com/poetry-panel

Nov. 12, Wed. , San Francisco, Bird & Beckett bookstore, Denise Low and Kim Shuck 7 pm., free https://birdbeckett.com/   

Nov. 14, Thurs. Santa Rosa Arts Center, Speakeasy Reading Series, Denise Low, open mic following, 7 pm, 312 South A St., Santa Rosa, music-Jeff Nathanson free, https://santarosaartscenter.org/index.php/speakeasy-2-2/ 
Nov. 15, Fri., Healdsburg, The 222-Paul Mahder Gallery, Denise Low and Lucille Lang Day, Indigenous Thanksgiving Traditions – The 222, 7 pm, 222 Healdsburg Ave., Healdsburg CA, $20

Nov. 17, Sun., Sebastopol, Wom-ba meeting 1 pm

Dec. 1, Sun. Berkeley, Poetry Flash, Denise Low and Lucille Lang Day, 3 pm Art House Gallery & Cultural Center (to be confirmed), 2905 Shattuck Avenue, refreshments, free (poetryflash.org).

March 29, Sat., Los Angeles AWP conference, Denise Low Bookfair Reading with Scarlet Tanager Press, 1:45 p.m.

+++++++++++++++++++++++++

“Justice is out of the purview of poetry, unfortunately. Otherwise, the ancestors of the ninety-six Lenapes killed by rogue Pennsylvania militia men in 1782 might read this collection and find some much deserved peace.”—FOREWORD Reviews

“House of Grace, House of Blood is a masterpiece of both documentary poetry and Indigenous storytelling. Denise Low’s exploration of history, memory, genealogy, and identity acknowledges the complexity of her bloodlines and the possibility of healing. Throughout, her poems become ‘portals for hearing pleas / and scriptures.’”—Craig Santos Perez, author of From Unincorporated Territory [åmot] and National Book Award winner

“Denise Low’s House of Grace, House of Blood chronicles the epigenetic expression of generational trauma left by the massacre of ninety-six Lenape Christian relatives inside a church in 1782. However, these poems also suggest epigenetic expressions of ancestral healing and reconciliation with living within contradictions, a powerful Indigenous inheritance that will leave you dancing in joyous resistance.”—Edgar Gabriel Silex, author of Acts of Love

Biography: Former Kansas Poet Laureate Denise Low is author of House of Grace, House of Blood, from the University of Arizona Press’s Sun Tracks poetry series (Oct. 2024). Her other books include the memoir The Turtle's Beating Heart: One Family's Story of Lenape Survival (University of Nebraska Press), Jigsaw Puzzling: Essays (Meadowlark Press, Coffin Award), and Casino Bestiary: Poems (Spartan Press). Low is a founding board member of the national Indigenous Nations Poets (In-Na-Po) and past board member and president of Associated Writers and Writing Programs. She has been visiting professor at the University of Kansas and University of Richmond. She taught at Haskell Indian Nations University 27 years, where she founded the creative writing program. She and her husband Thomas Weso founded Mammoth Publications, an independent press that specializes in Indigenous American and literary works. www.deniselow.net

More praise:

“House of Grace, House of Blood moves far beyond the personal narrative to create an experience that clearly identifies the blade edge that is so-called American history, and invites the reader to consider how exclusion and connection hone it.”—Mihku Paul, author of 20th Century PowWow Playland

“This account of the violence of ignorance and the heartbreak of broken trust is all too frequent—and all too frequently silenced, ignored, miswritten, or forgotten in our collective societal reckoning with the truth of our nation’s founding. And yet what Low seeks in House of Grace, House of Blood, what we who are compelled to bear witness in our verse seek in the telling, in the remembering, is a way forward through healing. The facts speak for themselves. The poet speaks for the dead—and those yet living.”—Abigail Chabitnoy, author of In the Current Where Drowning Is Beautiful

“With documentary and lyric intensity, Low claims poetry itself as memorial in her extraordinary new book.”—Hadara Bar-Nadav, author of The Animal Is Chemical

“The versatile and talented Denise Low ventures into documentary poetry in House of Grace, House of Blood with astonishing results. Through personal reflection, memories, imagined stories, chants, and collages of primary texts, she pieces together the story of one of the most heinous crimes against Indigenous people in North America. For Low, there are more questions than answers. These poems cinch the connections between religious and nationalist fervor, racial capitalism, and Indigenous survivance.”—Joseph Harrington, author of Disapparitions

National Book Critics Circle Announces Poetry Finalists

The award for best book of poetry published in 2023 will be selected from this short list, March, 2024 in NYC:

Saskia Hamilton, All Souls (Graywolf Press)

Kim Hyesoon, Phantom Pain Wings, translated by Don Mee Choi (New Directions)

Romeo Oriogun, The Gathering of Bastards (University of Nebraska Press)

Robyn Schiff, Information Desk (Penguin Books)

Charif Shanahan, Trace Evidence (Tin House)

Examining Life: Denise Low Interviews Robert Stewart

Higher: Poems, Poetry Press of Press Americana, 2023 Prize Americana, $15.00

I have known Bob Stewart as a friend and extraordinary editor for years. I admire his precision and store of knowledge about poetics, apparent in his editorial expertise during his tenure with New Letters and in his new book, Higher: Poems, winner of Prize Americana, which has precision in its execution and heart in its content. Stewart balances between narrative and song as he creates ballads about moments of heroism in everyday life. These are nourishing, sustaining poems, like this:

Stopping in the Road for a Turtle by Robert Stewart

Don’t hiss at me. Andre Dubus

rescued that brother and sister

on a highway in Haverville, so let me

here on 55^th Street in Crestwood,

6:20 a.m., stop and help you over

to the shrubs.

                        Box turtles I had

as a kid seemed mostly interior,

but you—neck out, jaw wrenching

like an opera singer’s—have less

turtleness

                        than serpent;

how heroic of us both, then,

with the pace of such progress,

to trust the car-full universe, when all

Andre Dubus meant to do was act

according to his nature, tough guy.

                        It crippled him

on that road, father of many

characters, and each always seemed

stranded outside a bar, or even home,

listening to some grieving soprano

on the radio. Sing, then turtle, hiss

                        your given voice.   (89)

 Denise Low: First, congratulations on winning the Prize Americana for this new book! In its offerings, I notice some folder poems as well as recent. How did you put this collection together?

Robert Stewart: The poems in Higher tend toward a public voice, I believe. I have been concerned lately with the presence in my writing of generativity, as Erik Erikson termed concern for future generations. That is my hope for the book, in any case. Some of what seem to be older poems in Higher might have just been percolating in my brain for years upon years and could be fairly recent. Others are older but did not fit previous books. Before my previous book Working Class (2018), I had not had a full-length book of poems for 30 years, even though I published essays and poems in journals. I can still hear my friend and mentor David Ray say, “These things [poems and stories] don’t go out of date.”  I subscribe to that principle.

My process is simply to keep writing and trust the process. “The good stuff and the bad stuff,” Marvin Bell has said, “are all part of the stuff.”  I looked at what I thought was the good stuff and began to think I had a book on my hands; so, as one does with poems, I tried to conceive of an order for them. That process is mysterious, even spooky to me; but once I got the first two or three lined up, I was on my way.

Denise Low: Titles of your other books of poetry are also simple, such as Working Class (Stephen Austin, 2017) and Plumbers (BkMk, 1988, 2^nd edition 2017). What significance do you intend with the title? And I find a pun, “hire,” for Higher, which ties in with the previous two titles.

Robert Stewart: I confessed recently (joked) to an audience that I didn’t realize I’d have to spell the book title Higher every time I spoke in public. I have tried to keep titles fairly clean in general, and a little slant. Many poetry book titles seem to me kind of pretentious. I won’t quote them here, but poetry book titles sometimes make me think of an essay by Robert Hass, where he was being self-critical of an image he’d created; he imagined what the master Basho would say of him: “Hass, you have a weakness for trying to say something unusual.” 

When the book came out, the poet Albert Goldbarth wrote to welcome me into the club of one-word book titles—with his Selfish and others—but, as you note, I already had another book with a one-word title, Plumbers. The manuscript of that book originally was called What It Takes to Be a Plumber. The editor and poet Dan Jaffe talked me out of it, saying it was too wordy. I told a group of friends at a party hosted by Gloria Vando and Bill Hickok that I could not come up with a less wordy title for that book; then David Ray spoke up and said, “Why don’t you just call it Plumbers?”  Perfect. I learned that simplicity can be illusive.

I chose Higher as a title because I was struck by the concept of aspiration, and, indeed, the book includes a fair number of calls to elevation—which does not mean to avert our eyes from reality; it means the opposite. My practice to seek some ascendant chord is really a structural necessity, I think. A good poem won’t strike just one note. It offers the reader contrast, tension, and fuller experience. I’m not saying that my poems do all that, but that’s the hope.

 Denise Low: You reference Christian spiritual practice directly and indirectly in these poems—brave in a time when religious affiliation is not usually addressed in contemporary poetry, which is mostly secular. I’m thinking of “Dog in Church,” “Piranha, Christmas Day,” “Late for Mass,” and the opening poem of the book, “In the Back Pews on Easter at St. Ann’s in Prairie Village, & Simultaneously St. Elizabeth’s in Waldo, St. Frances & Doubtless Our Lady of Sorrows, Midtown.” This last, which begins, “Babies being carried out to howl / in the lobby…,” reminds me of my childhood stints in pews of the Congregational Church of Emporia, Kansas. Babies were always squalling in the vestibule as a background accompaniment to the choir and sermon, and I wondered what that signified. Anyway, what choices are you making when you include this aspect of your life?

Robert Stewart: I once felt sheepish about using religious references in my poems, partly because I don’t see myself as devout or clear-headed. However, I try to live in wonder. The Catholic tradition has been integral to my life, and I am, therefore, both respectful of that tradition and angry toward it when the Church fails. In one poem, for example, I expect the priest “to apologize to us all.”  In the poem you mention about babies in church, I try to turn what had been an annoyance—babies screaming during Mass—into what I think is something playful and sacred. These things exist, and I am sustained by some truly great writers who write about religious practice, such as Brian Doyle, Mary Gordon, Sharon Olds, Marilynne Robinson, Marie Ponsot. I am just now reading essays by Czeslaw Milosz, as he examines his own life as a Catholic. I am not alone. The key word there is to “examine.”  I tend to eschew ideologies, but many of my “higher” values have been shaped by a religious education.

 Denise Low: I appreciate the authenticity of your writing and its integrity, seen in a poem like “My Father’s Haunt,” where you go into your father’s old bar in St. Louis. The familiar repartee with “men in overalls” shows your comfort with working class background. My own father wore overalls to work on the railroad, so this struck a note. Thank you for your honesty. How has this background affected your writing?

Robert Stewart: My grandfather was a plumber. My father was a plumber and later an executive in the plumbers and pipefitters union. One of my brothers and a nephew still work with the tools. I worked, as well, as a ditch digger and in the sewers of St. Louis, so I do feel at home with those working people. Moreover, what they do is profoundly honorable, in my view. When my first book, Plumber, came out, I left a stack of about ten with my father, who lived across state from me in St. Louis. The next time I visited, he said to bring more copies. “What are you doing with them?” I asked. He was taking them to the union hall and selling them. I have to say, I felt incredibly moved by that. One never gets over certain early experiences. Just this September 2023, I published an essay called “The Hole” in Italian Americana (I am the grandson of Sicilian Immigrants), which is about my work in manholes, excavations, ditches, and other forms of going down into the earth, its dangers and culture.            You asked earlier about titles, and I will add the two-word title of my 2018 book of poems, Working Class. That kind of generality normally would put me off; but I had played around with other titles, all fancy poetic images, cute, clever, and I decided, no; I want to just say something direct in the title and let the poems complicate the matter. That’s also what I hope for Higher.

 Denise Low: Anything else you would like to add?

Robert Stewart: A young woman student once asked Maxine Kumin how Kumin could tell if a student had potential to succeed as a poet. What do you look for? the student asked. Kumin answered, without hesitation, “Does she or he like to to play with words," Kumin answered, without hesitation. I happened to be present for the exchange, and I never forgot it. I included a coda to Higher, which is a quote from William Blake, “Energy is eternal delight.”  One of my criteria to measure how a poem would hold up includes how the language kind of dances, despite the seriousness of the content.

Denise Low: Bob, thank you for affirming here and in your new book how Socrates’ statement is true eternally: The unexamined life is not worth living.

 Robert Stewart is the former editor of New Letters magazine at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, where he was also editor of New Letters on the Air, a nationally syndicated literary radio program, and BkMk Press. At UMKC he taught poetry writing, magazine writing, and magazine editing. His books of essays include Outside Language (finalist for a PEN America award) and The Narrow Gate: Writing, Art & Values.   He has won a National Magazine Award for Editorial Achievement in the Essay category, from the American Society of Magazine Editors. His books include  Plumbers (poems, BkMk Press), and others. Poems have appeared in Denver Quarterly, The Iowa Review, Poetry Northwest, Prairie Schooner, Mangrove, Stand, Notre Dame Review, The Literary Review and other magazines. Anthology editorships include Spud Songs: An Anthology of Potato Poems (with Gloria Vando, benefit for hunger relief), and Decade: Modern American Poets (with Trish Reeves) and Voices From the Interior. He also is co-editor of the collection New American Essays (with Conger Beasley Jr., New Letters/BkMk Press)

Interview and reading from New Letters On the Air, audio.

Three poems from Higher published in The Montreal Review

BOOK DESCRIPTION OF HIGHER: POEMS: “The poems in Higher are at once direct and resonant, celebratory of the natural world and of spiritual aspirations. Rising from a working-class, blue-collar sensibility, these pieces range from a short work about using a sledgehammer on a street crew to a multi-part longer work about animals in changing nature. These lyric poems include subtle metrics and enough narrative to drive events, often with elegiac references to a military vet friend, a brother, a Sicilian grandmother, and literary heroes. Their focus ultimately returns to hope and care for children, often with no small amount of humor. This collection – from the winner of a National Magazine Award and Prize Americana – attests to our ability to pay attention, to detail what we see and what we hear, and, as such, aspire to joy.”

Michael Harty Publishes TWENTY STORIES: POEMS about a Tall Texas Building and More!

Michael Harty is a successful Kansas City area poet with roots in Lubbock, Texas. His new Twenty Stories: Poems centers on the tallest building in Lubbock, twenty-stories high. The pun on stories as heights and as narratives works well in the collection. I also grew up in a town with one tall building, a singular vertical in a flat grasslands town. In Emporia, Kansas, it was the Broadview Tower. In William Stafford’s Kansas, it was the building where the “elevator man” Gideon worked. Because of the large scale, there is a cinematic quality that reminds me of Muriel Rukeyser’s work. The visual point of view shifts around as well as the narration, the social contexts, and the natural environment. The poems are well written, accessible yet complicated by undercurrents, irony, and recurring themes.

Denise Low: First, congratulations on this original, provocative book! What is your background as a poet? I know  you win sonnet contests and publish regularly. What has been your way into this practice?

Mike Harty:  I always had writerly ambitions, but I gave up my undergraduate English major when I started thinking seriously about how I was going to earn a living. Psychology was a good choice for me, but I did continue to dabble in more creative writing alongside my clinical practice and some writing for professional journals. A turning point came when I wrote a memorial poem for my mother-in-law, a dear person; people were touched by that poem and encouraged me to do more. That encouragement helped me to get past my reluctance to “come out” as a poet, and I started to write more consistently, attend workshops and classes, and submit to journals. (As you know, classes I took with you were an important part of the process.) It’s true that the sonnet form has an appeal for me, and that sonnet competitions are a place where I’ve had some success. I like the challenge of combining expressiveness with concision, which all poetry requires but which in a sonnet needs to be contained within a (more or less) fixed structure. The poems in Twenty Stories, though, are very different from that, with what seems to me a more rambling, narrative quality.

Denise Low: When I read Twenty Stories, I think of William Stafford’s “Serving with Gideon,” the poem where the “elevator man" must drink from a paper cup and where “old boys who ran the town” were generous to their own kind. He miniaturizes the small-town culture with a few images, and you miniaturize the scale of Lubbock, Texas by taking readers to a twenty-story-high view of the town. Was Stafford ever an influence on you? Who are some other influences?

Mike Harty: Stafford is one of the poets I most admire, for what seems to me his marvelously inventive language that still remains grounded in real life. I will insert here a sonnet I wrote about him.

On Reading William Stafford’s Collection by Michael Harty

The cover opens like a neighbor’s door;

you welcome me, and speak to me in tones

both generous and kind. A voice like home,

yet wise, prophetic almost; you abhor

pretension, yet you touch the very core

of human secrets, poem after poem.

You write of small-town parks, of nights alone,

walks by the river; boots your father wore,

farm animals and trees – a vision wide

as prairie, yet returning in the end

to ordinary life, the shifting tides

that hold and toss us all. The words you’ve penned

are like a voice from someone at my side:

“See, this is how things are. Join me, my friend.”

#

It’s hard to identify specific influences beyond just mentioning poets I’ve admired at different times: Frost, W.S. Merwin, Donald Hall and Jane Kenyon, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Manning, plenty of others. I think also growing up in the presence of the King James Bible has had a lasting influence, via the majesty of its language and its connection with the most important questions. And rock-and-roll is in there too, the sense of liberation through sound and rhythm.

Denise Low:  Wonderful poem—you capture his tone and settings so well, and your simple and effective, “…yet returning in the end / to ordinary life, the shifting tides / that hold and toss us all.” Exactly. In your poems, I love the narratives you create in your poems, yet they are still lyrical. In your opinion, why are these poems and not short stories or flash fiction?

Mike Harty: I’m glad you find the poems lyrical, as I usually feel I work to make them that way; my revising process often seems to move from something more prosy and expository to (hopefully) something more evocative and layered. I’m not at all sure of the dividing line between, say, prose poem and flash fiction: I think of the poem more in terms of the illumination of a brief moment and the fiction as having more of a timeline and a story arc, but I also think that doesn’t really hold, even in my own poems. Maybe the reliance on images versus description is another point of difference, but again far from absolute. Probably the truth is that the substance of many poems would be suitable as well for a short (even long) fiction; I think in this book that’s true of the poems about the shoeshine man and the bootlegger, for example.

Denise Low: Boundaries of genres are shifting, indeed, and I think you clarify the difference between prose poems and flash fiction well. Story is implicit in any poem, more submerged in the 21^st century maybe than any other time in history. You work as a psychoanalyst, where you must hear many stories. Who are your influences in that field? Jung? And how has that work fed your creative writings?

Mike Harty: I recently looked through my accumulated poems with the question in mind of which ones visibly drew on my psychoanalytic work. I found surprisingly few. Occasionally there was a character, or a situation drawn from that experience, but I came away thinking the main influence was something less obvious but more pervasive, more in the nature of a habit of mind or an outlook on life. It has to do with recognizing complexity (especially in people’s motives), resisting quick answers, being willing to face unpleasant truths without giving in to pessimism, finding beauty without denying ugliness. Those are the aspirations, anyhow. As a psychoanalyst I’ve never been much of a Jungian, as I tend to shy away from approaches that seem overly mystical. I have, however, moved away from the more strictly Freudian orientation of my early career into what would be called a more “object-relational” approach. Probably the theorist I’ve found most influential is Donald Winnicott, a British analyst who started out as a pediatrician and had a lot of fruitful ideas about mothers and babies.

Denise Low: What are you working on next? What are some upcoming publications? Where can readers find your videos or audio readings online?

Mike Harty: I do have another chapbook coming out any time now (from Finishing Line

Press); its title is “Real Country”, and the poems deal with the world of a farm kid, which I both was and wasn’t. (My family lived on a small farm, and I went to a country school, but my father’s work as well as our church affiliation were in town.) Aside from that, there are a couple of projects that are in some stage of development. One is a modified crown of sonnets (nine

poems rather than the standard seven) portraying a baseball team (a poem for each position). I don’t know where I’ll go with that one. The other “project” is less organized, and I come back to it intermittently; it consists of poems that imagine the later life of characters in old rock-and-roll songs (“Maybelline”, “Long Tall Sally”, “Slow Walkin’ Jones”). Generally, though, I’ve found it tougher to write lately, I think mainly because political/societal issues, as well as the pandemic, have claimed so much attention. Many thanks for this opportunity. I’m not at all good at having an on-line presence, but I’m glad to hear from any readers who don’t want to deal with Amazon. They can email me at mharty2[at]kc.rr.com.

Twenty Stories: Poems by Michael Harty. $17.00. Twenty Stories – Kelsay Books 978-1639803095

Michael Harty is a Kansas City poet now, but his Texas boyhood is a continuing influence in his work. A second influence is his long career as a practicing psychoanalyst, which fosters an appreciation for the conflicts, struggles, and complexities of human life. His poems often have appeared in the Texas Poetry Calendar, as well as in other periodicals including New Letters, The Lyric, Measure, I-70 Review, Coal City Review, and others. Among his honors and recognitions are several Pushcart nominations as well as awards in a number of sonnet competitions – the Maria W. Faust Sonnet Contest, the Nebraska Shakespeare sonnet competition, the Howard Nemerov Sonnet Award contest – and in the New Letters Poetry Contest and the Rattle Magazine Ekphrastic Challenge. His first chapbook, The Statue Game, appeared in 2015; both Twenty Stories and Real Country are appearing in 2023. More about Michael Harty: Interview, Johnson County Library Meet the Author: Michael Harty | Johnson County Library (jocolibrary.org) . Mike Harty poem, 2016 in Denise Low Postings Denise Low Postings: Michael Harty, poet, reads April 17 from THE STATUE GAME