Robin Cody is a native Oregonian who understands the geography of people and place. Along with dozens of published articles, he’s written a guide book (Umbrella Guide to Bicycling the Oregon Coast, Umbrella Books, 1990), a Columbia River travel narrative (Voyage of a Summer Sun, Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, 1995) and the novel Ricochet River (Alfred A. Knopf Incorporated, 1992), set in the fictional Oregon town of Calamus. In 2005, Ooligan Press released a revised version of the novel to help get the book in the hands of more teachers and young adult readers. Part-one of our interview focuses on Cody’s approach to writing, revising and giving new life to his work. Part-two of our interview will appear early in 2009.

(DJ): Ricochet River was quite a process…

(RC): I’d been teaching English at the American School in Paris where you could teach the hotshot sophomores Sometimes a Great Notion and King Lear, then take them to Stratford on Avon during the year. Catcher in the Rye, Huckleberry Finn, To Kill a Mockingbird. I could pick the books I wanted to teach. When you read those books, after a while you figure out that the narrators don’t get it. Take a character like Wade (narrator in Ricochet River). It’s pretty obvious that he’s not the brightest guy in the book. Lorna has figured out this place. Jesse isn’t school smart, but he has that instinctual brilliance.

I wrote Ricochet River a number of times. I couldn’t get it published. It wasn’t good enough. I had to go back and write it again and think about why I liked Kesey’s book, and go back and read it again and figure out how he did that. Or the idea of Huck Finn going down the river. He’s reporting to us as if he’s with a dumb runaway slave. We get it as readers, but Huck’s not interpreting. He’s not preaching. He’s not doing that stuff. And that’s the kind of narrator I liked. That was the key to getting it published.

(DJ): So it hinged on the narrator?

(RC): On the narrator and some other stuff. I needed some more Indian lore, coyotes, those kinds of things. I didn’t have that stuff in the first version. But I wrote this thing over 17-years of teaching, coaching baseball, sending a manuscript out, getting rejected. And when you get a manuscript rejected widely, you lose your confidence and suddenly you’re not any good as a writer for a while. You have to wait for it to bubble back up. Say, “Well, I’ll try it again.” No one had written this story related to the life cycle of the salmon, and the Oregonness of it. At least I didn’t think it had been written yet.

Another clue to the breakthrough narrator was One Flew Over the Cukoo’s Nest. The story’s told through Chief Broom, who’s really in a fog. He doesn’t get it. We have to interpret it, which draws us into the story.

(DJ): Seventeen years is a long time.

(RC): Cyclically. It happened in cycles. I liked my life as a teacher. I never thought of myself as a writer (in Paris). I’d gone to school at Yale, so I knew what it was like not to be the brightest guy, surrounded by really smart people.

(DJ): Were you there when Bush was there?

(RC): I was the captain of the baseball team when he was a freshman. In those years freshman weren’t allowed on the varsity team. And this kid from the freshman team would come into the varsity dugout and put his arm around the coach. It had to be explained to me that he was the son to the ambassador of whatever Bush Sr. was doing then…the son of a famous guy and a legacy at Yale. So the coach had coached his dad. But it was the whole deal we’d see later, the schmoozing, glad handing (laughter).

Going from there to Paris, it was the first time I was surrounded by really creative, free thinking people. That helped a lot.

(DJ): What about the revised version?

(RC): That was a marketing decision. I hadn’t written Ricochet River for teens at all. Eventually it ran its course in general sales. But English teachers were picking it up and doing great with it, except there’s this sex scene that gets it blocked by Christian school boards. Another scene that takes place at the Dalles, four people and two beds, drinking and that sort of stuff. All the time I was bumping up with censorship. In the revised version, I made it less explicit. There’s really very little difference.

(DJ): What was that like revising something you’d written so long ago? All writers get to that point where we know we can make things better. How was it going back to it?

(RC): I made it better. I made the sentences better. It’s surprising, because once a book is in print, you read parts of it at Powell’s, book fairs, something like that, but you never go back and read it all the way through. And I found lots of ways it could be improved, mostly by subtraction. Sort of, “That sentence doesn’t have to be there. It just slows the story down.”

It’s all at the sentence level. It’s not content at all, except for that scene at the Dalles and the sex scene. The Christians call it literary pornography (laughs).

(DJ): Does that make you a literary pornographer?

(RC): Yeah (laughs). They even have a website against the book. I’m convinced the new version is better writing.

(DJ): I saw someone comparing it to Catcher in the Rye, which has also found its way on the banned books list. Does it hurt you that there’s outcry against it? Does it make you laugh?

(RC): It’s just a fact of life. The book had no future of sales. It was being kept out of the hands of kids. So no, the alternative was that it was out of print. It was my idea to do it.

(DJ): You approached Ooligan or they approached you?

(RC): I approached them. The book was out of print for no fault of its own. It had had steady sales, and suddenly I’m getting calls from teachers because they can’t replace it, those who were able to teach it. So I said, “Let’s do a school version that really won’t have to change that much.”

With Ooligan being a teaching press at Portland State, I had six graduate students in the editing class go through and underline the things that caught their eye from the first version. I told them what we were going to make less explicit. Otherwise, I wanted them to suggest things, point out where it didn’t make sense, what stopped it. Of course they went overboard with their underlining (laughter). But, one out of three things they caught…for example, for my generation, when people talked about “that U2 incident,” that referred to the spy plane shot down over Russia. To younger readers, it’s a rock band. It made no sense to them. They didn’t know U2 was a downed surveillance plane. I didn’t hesitate to change it. I’m always changing things anyway. When you’re a writer, you try to spin older stuff off to different audiences. I’m used to thinking of everything that I’ve already done as not finished. That it can be better.

(DJ): What about your new collection.

(RC): The Oregonness of It. Which is a phrase that came from an actual meeting with an editor in New York at Knoff, about Ricochet River. We’re high above the bleeding cabs of New York, 23rd story of some building and he’s got piles of manuscripts around, looking every bit like a caricature of the rumpled and mussed editor. So I asked how he it was that he picked this manuscript out of the pile. And he didn’t talk about the story. He talked first about the “Oregonness of it.”

I’ve written some about that, about what makes us different as a culture out here. How we’re different from American literature. Really it’s an argument about how we’ve developed in three phases, from the woodsman and river taming phase, the dam builders, the loggers and all those heroes, through Ken Kesey and to a new phase that I think makes some sense.

(DJ): What do you think the new phase is?

(RC): Nature as teacher. Taking our cues from nature. How to live in balance with nature. If we can do it out here in the greenest corner of the richest nation on earth. Or if we can’t live in balance with the salmon and the woods, I don’t think it can be done anywhere. If we can, then we’re a model for the rest of the world. It’s not stated directly in our literature. It’s stated slantingly that we’re different. Nature’s alive. As in Kesey, nature’s a character in the good stuff we write.

All my stuff, even as a non-fiction writer, is told slantingly. It comes out of someone else’s mouth. I don’t want to preach it. Then there’s one whole section just about the jobs I’ve had. Bus driving, baseball umpiring. Refereeing, or lighter stuff like “Deaf Basketball.” That’s an example—it was twice as long when I first wrote it for Northwest Magazine. Then I sold it to somebody else and cut down on it. I read it at Fishtrap this summer, and one of their rules at open mic is you get four-minutes. So I chopped it down and it was better, punchier. It’s that process of having to do it over and over, getting better through subtraction.

(DJ): What happens to the old stuff that doesn’t make it?

(RC): I have an electronic trail of what had been. Before computers I kept hard copies of what had changed. Sometimes you have reason to go back and say, “How’d I write that the first time. Maybe it needs a little more here.”

(DJ): There are these parts throughout Ricochet River where, through the narrative, you seem to be revealing something about writing itself. There’s the scene just after the suicide squeeze where we have Wade in the barbershop. He says, “I guess sometimes, at least at the barbershop, reality has to adjust to the story.” Do you get to that point between the truth and the story where, as a writer, you have to honor both?

(RC): I think the story can often drive to the heart of the truth better than the facts do. This is not just me. This is Ken Kesey, where Hank in Sometimes a Great Notion, you know, he plays the dumb logger, but he comes up with this stuff. He says, “Well, maybe it didn’t happen, but it’s the truth. And maybe some things that did happen are not the truth.” I just love that kind of thinking. I can give it to Wade by saying, “I guess…” because he’s just poking at things. If I said it as the author I would just say it right out. But it’s not me. It’s Wade. He’s not that smart of a guy. He doesn’t know the answer. That’s what interests me. That’s what, I think, made Wade better as a narrator. In those first versions of the book that got rejected, he was as bright as Lorna. He was sort of spouting. He gets the racism of the town, for example. It’s not nearly as interesting as having Wade trying to figure things out. Before he used to get it. He understood it. It’s more interesting when you don’t understand it and you’re just trying to figure things out. It was a conscious change, and I couldn’t have done it on the first draft.

Robin Cody is the author of Ricochet River, a novel, and Voyage of a Summer Sun, winner of the 1996 Oregon Book Award for creative non-fiction. He lives in Portland with his wife, Donna. An earlier version of “Deaf Basketball” appeared in Northwest Magazine in November, 1988.

When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind that the players are deaf. Blow the whistle and they just keep going. How would they know? Make crisp visual signals, and allow them a little more touching on defense. You wouldn’t think sound helps track a basketball opponent, but apparently it does.

I refereed the Oregon State School for the Deaf, from Salem, at Westside Christian School in Portland. Varsity girls. The deaf girls played basketball with exuberant energy and unthrottled emotion. They had fun. I’d forgotten there isn’t much laughing out loud in high school basketball. These girls emitted quick shrieks of surprise or pleasure as they went grunting and careening about the court. They lost badly but cheerfully to the Christians.

They did have one good athlete, a tall blonde with fine springs in her legs and a bright spark to her eye. Gazelle-like, she moved. She snagged rebounds that weren’t meant for her. She fired sharp outlet passes. On offense she had a nose for the basket, but her teammates seldom delivered her the ball.

Late in the game, this gazelle girl got the ball in the key. She took a couple of steps without remembering to dribble, and drilled a sweet hook shot.

My referee partner, Ed Denmark, a well-to-do hardwood dealer in real life – had whistled the play dead. Traveling. The poor girl’s celebration at having sunk her pretty shot was eclipsed now as she realized it wouldn’t count. She grabbed the ball and slammed it to the floor with sufficient force that – although she right away knew better and tried to smother it – the ball rebounded above her head.

The normal and accepted procedure here is for the referee to blow a T. A technical foul. It was Denmark’s call, not mine. What would he do? I held my breath. The kid was sorry. She’d already lost that neat hoop. Her team was getting crushed. Mercifully, Denmark decided just to warn her. He would explain it to her.

But she’s deaf.

The game stopped. We summoned her coach from the bench to sign this decision to the girl. She was contrite but thoroughly puzzled, expecting the T but getting words. So you see. Mercy was the wrong call, the same call I would have made in Denmark’s spot. When you referee a deaf basketball team, keep in mind the kids are just deaf. They’re not stupid. The girl deserved a T.

* * *

After the game I showered, changed clothes, and settled into the deaf section of the bleachers to watch the boys’ teams warm up. The gazelle girl was not wearing a cheerleader outfit, but she posted herself among the cheerleaders and joined right in.

Deaf cheerleaders have all the right moves, but they voice no sound. Here they trotted over to the opposite side of the court to face the home team fans. They mimed an introductory cheer that included acrobatic routines and finished with individual salutes — “Hi, I’m Deborah,” “Hi, I’m Judy” — you know that one. Each cheerleader, in turn, tried to say her name out loud. In most cases, you could tell what her name was.

When they came back to our side, an American flag appeared at mid-court. We all stood at attention, with hands over hearts. A chubby girl from the Christian school sang “The Star Spangled Banner” into a microphone. She was good. She was so good singing the anthem that a great wave of sadness passed through me. I’m not what you would call a sucker for the national anthem, but this was chilling.

When the anthem was over, the deaf kids knew it was OK to make noise. In fact the hearing-impaired can generate unseemly noise just taking a seat, unwrapping a Snickers bar, chewing potato chips and signing joy. While our section was preoccupied that way, the Christian fans across the court had bowed in silence. A young man at the scorer’s table was reciting a prayer.

Nobody else in my section knew it.

Soon the adult sitting next to me – probably a teacher – saw what was up. Her look of panic must have mirrored my own as our eyes met. She tried to nudge and sign silence through our rude section of the bleachers, but we probably succeeded only in drawing more attention from the prayerful. It was awful. What would these Christians think of us?

When their gaffe finally dawned on the deaf students, the prayer was over. They, too, felt awful. For maybe three full seconds. Just long enough for each cheerleader to face the home crowd and – apparently spontaneously, all at once – slap a palm to her forehead and roll eyes heavenward in a how-stupid-could-we-be-please-forgive-us gesture that would break your heart, it was so correct.

J.D. Smith is an amazingly versatile writer who explores the art of telling a story, capturing an image, scattering truths and creating worlds from any number of angles and vantage points. His books include the collection, Settling for Beauty (Cherry Grove Collections), The Hypothetical Landscape (Quarterly Review of Literature Poetry Series), the edited anthology Northern Music: Poems About and Inspired by Glenn Gould (John Gordon Burke, Publisher), and The Best Mariachi in the World (Raven Tree Press), a recently released bilingual children’s book. Three of his poems, along with an excerpt from a 2005 essay, are featured on the Creative page. We conversed through email exchange, discussing his work and his approach.

DJ: The first thing that strikes me is your ability to move swiftly between genres and forms. You prove adept at moving between emotions and perspectives within a given piece – connecting what’s happening beyond the “I”, then projecting what’s happening within. I’d like to discuss your poem, “Elegy,” which is a wonderful example of this in-and-out movement.

The opening, coupled with the title, is a great set up for nostalgia:

“Dusk. The plangent geese migrate.
Ragged chevrons that used to bisect a continent
now settle near a golf course and the retaining pond”

Half-way through, it begins to read like a social and pop-culture commentary:

“…that bathes the climax
of a made-for-TV film
about the latest disease
or another private distress
raised to a social issue, if not elevated:”

Suddenly I’m spun in yet another direction, this one with a great sense of self-deprecation:

“From my depths, I’ve summoned
a spiral thread of hair, less than
what I could have called myself,
without affecting a second language:
asshole.”

With all these wonderful turns, you never lose the reader. We’re always watching a flock of geese settling near an office park. How do you keep yourself from getting lost when the landscape of the poem follows such a meandering course, moving, if you will, through a set of mental gymnastics?

JDS: What prevents me from losing the reader in a poem like that is not inflicting my first draft on him or her. My first drafts are usually considerably longer than the final version and include alternative versions of lines as well as lines and sometimes stanzas that don’t survive until the final draft. Over the course of multiple revisions I try to remove as many obstacles to understanding as I can. This means that over time I have to learn what is and isn’t essential in a poem, which leaps of association can and cannot be made.

As for moving among different tones and levels of languages, that’s something I’ve had to do all my life in dealing with people from different backgrounds. In my first 14 years I lived in a neighborhood with a sizable population of transplanted Southerners, and from kindergarten onward I have been in one or another setting with a variety of ethnic groups, educational levels and social classes. This has meant learning to speak a variety of “languages” on any given day and learning how to shift gears or, as the linguists call it, switch codes.

DJ: Where are you most at home? Is there a path you like to follow, or are you happy to follow whatever path come along? Reading your work, I see a writer who is equally adept at communicating a vision and crafting a story regardless of style. Not many writers have this luxury, or perhaps many writers begin to whittle down their choices over time, finding the place where they feel most “at home.” Have you identified this place, or are you comfortable roving?

JDS: I might get tangled up in semantic games here, but roving might be that place for me. You’ve probably heard about how foxes are supposed to know many things, but hedgehogs know one great thing. With all due respect to the hedgehogs—and you need them to make the world run—I’m one of the foxes who wander all over the place.

Although I still think of myself primarily as a poet, which is probably as much a matter of habit as anything else, I’ve also learned again and again that writing poetry is not something I can sit down and do in the same way that I can write expository prose. I definitely look forward to writing more essays, since essays give me the opportunity to engage in free association in the same way as poetry but without the same demands for compression and heightened language, and with more room for pursuing a line of argument.

In a moment of grandstanding I once told a friend “I want to be an industry.” That doesn’t mean the insane brand leveraging of, say, Hannah Montana, but something more like a one-person studio with a wide range of written “products.” My ideal would be a full-time, multi-faceted writerly life like that of Margaret Atwood or David Mamet.

DJ: One topic or theme that comes up, regardless of form, is our physical/sexual natures. Here again, you approach the topic from a number of perspectives, voices and styles. In your poem, “Coitus,” from Settling for Beauty, you guide the reader with a sense of reverence and distance:

“It is only flesh
Meeting more of the same,

The means for a double helix
To spiral through time.”

Compare this with your article, “An Immodest Proposal”, where you approach the topic with great objectivity, humor, and humanitarianism, proposing Viagra as a way to curb the poaching of endangered animals for aphrodisiacal reasons. Finally, there’s a story like “Pillow Talk”, where the narrator comes across as something of a hapless yet hopeful everyman, obsessing over a certain part of the female anatomy until he moves on to a new obsession.

As you approach a given theme from different angles, do you find that one style or voice tends to inform or affect the others? Though you demonstrate a keen ability to zero in on your subject in a way that fits the form and genre, I’m wondering if your mental partitions are fairly permeable. When you’re sitting over a poem, for instance, do you find another voice trickling in, informing the words that make it to the page?

JDS: This is a challenging question, but the pieces that you bring up invite that line of inquiry. My relationship with my own physicality has always been complicated. In my earlier years I was overweight and experienced an early onset of puberty, and in grade school I was bigger than most of the other children. Then at about the age of thirteen I stopped growing and am now about five-two. That sense of being different and out of sync, combined with depression that wasn’t adequately treated until I was in my thirties, made for an impoverished love life and a feeling there was this big party that almost everyone else was going to, but not me. I spent a lot of time as Cyrano de Bergerac pining after one or another Roxanne who would have been all wrong for me anyway.

In different pieces I have written about the erotic with detachment or some attempt at being straightforward. Still, what’s painful is also the source of humor. Sexual desire and romantic longing cut through a lot of pretension and show us as the needy buffoons that we often are. All of these approaches have their place, considering how complicated Eros is for humans compared to other animals.

There’s a final irony to this situation. Now that I’ve found the right woman and am married, I largely write about less personal subjects. My thinking and writing are largely given over to aesthetic and ethical concerns, and the state of the world at large.

DJ: What are your present concerns, and how do you see them informing your work? How are you, in your work and even in your life, approaching them to create some sort of reconciliation, or at least attempting to find peace with modern times?”

JDS: Predictably, I suppose, my concerns are moving from the issues of youth to the issues of middle age. These are not just the exclusively personal side of coming to grips with mortality and other limitations, like those of energy, ability and financial means, but also how to make some small contribution to the world within those limitations. Or in spite of them.

In even less personal terms, my writing has turned increasingly to how to help people move toward a balanced relationship with the natural world, which to me seems to bring together aesthetic concerns and human self-actualization in terms of both of our evolutionary biology and our spiritual dimensions. I have more questions than answers, but it seems that we ignore the aesthetic aspects of life at our peril, short-term savings aside. To take just a couple of examples, what happens to food and architecture in the name of efficiency and narrowly defined cost-cutting boggles the mind.

A related issue is how to cut through the thickets of media overstimulation and reclaim consciousness so as to find an authentic relationship with the world and oneself. There’s a lot of media analysis out there, but a lot of it bogs down in theory and academic jargon or simply doesn’t bother to explain why we should engage in what Iggy Pop once called “psychic defense.”

DJ: From here, then, perhaps it’s a question of process for you. Do you go to a different place depending on genre, style, form, etc., or do you drink from the same well using different cups?

JDS: For the most part, different pieces of writing suggest themselves to me in different forms. It took me a long time to learn to listen rather than impose my ideas. I don’t want to get too mystical about saying “where the poem leads me” and such, but I usually know from the beginning what should be a formal or free verse poem, what should be an essay, and what should be a piece of fiction. For a long time I thought of myself only as a poet and tried to turn everything into a poem, which seemed to involve less work, but I only ended up with a lot more failed poems than successful poems. Writing pieces in their most appropriate form may entail more work, but it leads to far less frustration.

DJ: Consider a poem like “Bout” and a short story like “This Time”. Both play with concepts of violence and defeat, yet do so in completely different ways. Reading these, I see a writer who wants to explore a topic from as many angles as possible. Or is it more unconscious than that, where you are simply willing to follow the muse wherever she takes you, whether it’s a 10-line poem or a 2000 word short that appears in a place like Thuglit.com?

JDS: To me, at least, the two ideas you stated may be complementary rather than mutually exclusive. I spend a lot of time ruminating about things from a variety of angles, and some of those thoughts turn into what I write. Many other thoughts, perhaps most of them, do not turn into written work. Of course, I don’t know which part of my daydreaming is “productive” until well after the fact. Writing about topics from different perspectives is also a way of arguing with myself and trying to escape a purely binary mode of thought, something our technologies increasingly impose on us.

Violence is a subject that particularly troubles and engages me. I am squeamish and mild-mannered—I have witnesses for both—but I can’t bring myself to the purity of being a pacifist in the world as we find it. Violence can be great fun to read and write about—or see on screen—but violence also serves as a symptom of other disorders and it places a story or poem in the tradition of the cautionary tale. The work of Flannery O’Connor comes to mind in this regard.

DJ: Tell me a little about your latest work, The Best Mariachi in the
World. Where does a book like this fit in, where did the initial concept come from, and how does it relate to what’s come before? Or, is it a case where the relation doesn’t matter beyond the fact that it has your name on it?

JDS: This book is a very recent publication, but its history goes back to 1997, before my first book of poetry was accepted for publication. I wrote the first draft while commuting by train from my parents’ home in Aurora, Illinois to one or the other of my two part-time, no-benefits jobs in Chicago. I didn’t want those jobs to seem like the only thing I was accomplishing, and I was starting to realize that the only way I would really make anything of myself was through writing. (Some of my earlier plans hadn’t worked out, or I just hadn’t wanted them enough.)

I didn’t have anything to lose besides ink and paper, and I started with a premise that ranges somewhere between wacky and outrageous: Gustavo, a young boy in a family of mariachis, believes that he is the worst mariachi in the world because he cannot play—or isn’t even allowed to play—any of the instruments. I am not musical or from a musical family myself, and I am not of Mexican or other Hispanic ancestry, so I was going out on a limb in addressing these subjects. Working through the story allowed me to figure out that what Gustavo could do at that point was sing, and his family and others applaud him for his ability. It later became clear to me that I had written an allegory of my own attempts to find my way. There were plenty of things I couldn’t do, but I could write, and that would be accepted. For others that thing might be in the arts or in another field altogether, but finding and embracing it is crucial. I dedicated the book in part to all the Gustavos of the world, because almost all of us are Gustavo at one time or another. The only exception might be those blessed few who at the age of five know what they want to be when they grow up and happily follow through with that.

DJ: So if someone was to pin you in a corner and say, “OK J.D. Smith, explain what in the world is going on here,” how would you answer? Personally, it’s inspiring to see a writer approach so many areas of interest with such lightness. Does hopping back and forth between genres, voices and styles help you maintain a certain level of dexterity, allowing you to eschew the moniker of “Jack of all trades” and instead embody the concept of “Master of many”? If there’s a
thread that weaves through your entire body of work, what would it be?

JDS: If someone pinned me in a corner I would first say “Please don’t hit me in the face” and then “I don’t have anything of value—I’m a writer.”

More seriously, I am reminded of one of Goya’s late etchings, a self-portrait of the artist walking on crutches in his eighties. The illustration bears the inscription “I am still learning.” That was true: he explored new techniques and media until the end of his life. This lesson was delivered to me more directly at the Bread Loaf Writers Conference in 1992, when William Matthews, my instructor, looked over my poems of wildly varying quality and said, “You’re still finding out what you can do.” And I am still finding out what I can do. I haven’t written a full-length play, for instance. I haven’t written a novel, either, and I’m starting to get some serious peer pressure on that count. I might try and fail miserably, but I’m starting to feel secure enough to live with that.

Writing in different voices and genres allows me to stay fresh mentally, and it also means that I always have something to work on, whether that means a first draft or a revision. And there are many revisions. Crossing genres also helps me to resist complacency. If I’m having good luck in writing or publishing in one genre, there remains the question that would sound something like “What else are you doing, tough guy?”

It’s hard to say what ties all of my work together, but a few ideas come to mind. The first is an interest in the sound of language, especially its rhythms. I learned this initially through poetry, but I’d like to think it comes through in prose as well. I’m also interested in how much meaning can be packed into a given amount of text through word choice, connotation and economy in language, as well as through syntax. I would also like to think that what I write, even if it’s a piece that’s seen as entertainment, carries some intellectual and moral weight and helps to enhance readers’ sense of being alive and engaged in the world.

J.D. Smith was awarded a 2007 Fellowship in Poetry from the United States National Endowment for the Arts. He has published two collections of poetry: The Hypothetical Landscape and Settling for Beauty. His poetry has received three Pushcart nominations, while his essays and reviews have appeared in American Book Review, Grist and Pleiades.

Smith’s newly published children’s book, The Best Mariachi in the World, is a bilingual (English/Spanish) embedded text picture book that incorporates cultural tradition, wishes, and finding happiness.

The following poems and essay excerpt are previously published, and are featured here with the author’s permission. An interview with J.D. Smith will appear Friday, 11/14 on the blog. Visit his website to read more of his work.

Elegy

Dusk. The plangent geese migrate.
Ragged chevrons that used to bisect a continent
now settle near a golf course and the retaining pond
of an office park, small oxymoron
inside the larger, land development.
The flocks will rest in head-tucked clusters,
low, transient monoliths, like modest gods
left by a miniature people.

Still, the land-crossing cry
persists as if to close
not a day, but a season,
and mark its loss
with a portion of the brokenness
that informs the haiku’s heart
and the weightless bone, somewhere in my heart,
that is struck and softened
by the sentimental string arrangement
that bathes the climax
of a made-for-TV film
about the latest disease
or another private distress
raised to a social issue, if not elevated:
all is forgiven, by everyone, at death’s door.
Inevitably as that death,
the notes well up, break forth,
and with them my tears.

Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Pendejo que soy!
The small tide breaks
against my reason.
Literally, in Spanish,
what a pubic hair, meaning fool, I am.
Even my confession is reduced.
In Latin Augustine cried Mea saura!
Literally, what a lizard I am,
Meaning the serpent’s cousin,
and hardly less intimate
with the foot-hardened ground.
Mea maxima saura!
What a great lizard I am,
shouted across the gulf
between perdition and salvation,
showing the passage that awaits
those who can summon
such heights and depths.

From my depths, I’ve summoned
a spiral thread of hair, less than
what I could have called myself,
without affecting a second language:
asshole.

Others might.
I should welcome a promotion to simple flesh,
untroubled by distant sounds that weaken
and arrive to no effect, no more than
an earthquake on another continent disturbs
an office park’s builders, or their earnings.
I could look past the short flights
now joined to the landscape
like sparrows, or a soybean field.

(published in Innisfree Poetry Journal, Issue 1)

Bout

I punch a gray wall
and break nothing.

The bones of my fingers
have not cracked,
their skin is not scraped.

We can spar like this for hours
until, bored with me,
the low fog burns away.

(published in right hand pointing)

Coitus

It is only flesh,
More or less the same compendium

Of water, laced
With carbon and trace minerals,

That makes up a bison’s leg,
The pork on a plate.

It is only flesh
Meeting more of the same,

The means for a double helix
To spiral through time.

It is simply flesh
In an aroused state,

Soon satisfied,
Made a vessel

Of attachment, of regret, infused—
afflicted—by what some call a spirit,

Whose noted powers
Do not include taking back

The entanglement of flesh with other flesh,
Now complex as a molecule.

(from Settling for Beauty, by Cherry Grove Collections)


An Immodest Proposal (excerpt)

How a little blue pill could get big results — in species conservation, we mean

Quick: what do sea turtles, black bears, and Philippine fruit bats have in common? At first glance, not much. They don’t look alike, and they have very different ranges and habitats. In fact, one would be hard-pressed even to find them on any of the same guest lists.

But these creatures share one very important trait. Along with seahorses, rhinoceroses, and macaques, they are all hunted, sold, and consumed for use in potions and dishes with alleged “aphrodisiacal properties.” For men. And I think we know what that means.

In a more perfect world, we men might be willing to age gracefully and hang up — well, whatever it is we hang up, say, spurs — and retire from certain pleasures of the flesh. When that happens, though, men will be too distracted to care. We’ll be busy watching pigs fly.

Until that day arrives, there will be a market for products that enhance “male performance” (presumably not in rugby). In Asia and Central America, among other places, this means resorting to traditional, animal-based remedies. Two tragedies can result. The first is personal: they may not work. The second is even, ahem, greater: threatened species are being hunted to extinction, with untold consequences for ecosystems and economies.

As experts in international development know, however, this is generally not a matter of good guys and bad guys, black hats and white. Poachers, often poor and uneducated, are simply trying to make a living by meeting a demand. If the market for their contraband product dries up, or if alternative livelihoods are available, they might well find other work.

Of course, this is easier said than done. Behavior and culture take time to change, and there is no silver bullet. There is, however, a little blue pill.

Yupper. That one. Sildenafil citrate, though no one calls it that. It is currently sold by Pfizer (in which I have no stock) under the name of Viagra, but even after the patent expires the name seems likely to remain in the language, like Kleenex or Xerox, as the term for a whole product category and not just one brand.

Of course, there are now other products for the treatment of erectile dysfunction, which goes by the friendly acronym ED. (This sounds like someone you might play poker with once a week.) Treatments for our pal ED now include Bayer and GlaxoSmithKline’s Levitra (vardenafil hydrochloride), a brand name derived from the Latin root of the verb “to raise,” and ICOS and Eli Lilly’s Cialis (tadalafil), which sounds like an MTV VJ from the late 1980s. More brands are forthcoming and, as with Viagra, after the patent period expires, the eventual generic market for these drugs is expected to be sizeable.

The implication is clear. If we want to save black bears and rhinos, we have to get these drugs into the hands of the people who would otherwise be paying for those animals’ parts or doing the hunting for themselves.

(Read the entire article from the March 22, 2005 issue of Grist online.)

I sat across from John Morrison in a poetry workshop a few years ago and couldn’t figure what he was doing there, certain, after a brief conversation, that he should have been teaching a workshop of his own. He was well on his way to doing that and plenty more. By then he’d already earned his MFA from the University of Alabama. A year after the workshop, he’d receive the C. Hamilton Bailey Poetry Fellowship from Portland-based Literary Arts. In 2007, Bedbug Press published his first full-length collection, Heaven of the Moment, which is a finalist for the 2008 Oregon Book Award in poetry. John and I got together recently at the Star E. Rose cafe to talk writing, teaching and process.

DJ: I’d like to start by reading something out of Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town, which is a book I know you’ve used in some of your classes. Hugo writes in his opening: “You’ll never be a poet until you realize that everything I say today and this quarter is wrong. It may be right for me, but it is wrong for you. Every moment I am, without wanting or trying to, telling you to write like me. But I hope you learn to write like you. In a sense I hope I don’t teach you how to write but how to teach yourself how to write.”

Do you catch yourself, or have you caught yourself doing this, and what’s your process to move away from that place where we’re inadvertently teaching others to write like us?

JM: I think, to some degree, workshops are a sham. We enter into them in a charlatan-like fashion. I do explicitly tell my students, “I can only teach you to write like me.” Which, I think, gives them the freedom to do what Hugo says next, which is, “Keep your crap detector on.” If it’s not working for you, then back off. Also, it’s important for a teacher to go, “I can be wrong about this.” You don’t want students to do something because you tell them to. You want them to do something, read something, think something, try a different line, try a different ending, because they want to. They have to choose it. They’re not going to choose it if it’s simply my idea.

I’m afraid this is a little bit of a cop out, but I am big on telling my students I’m not teaching them to write the poems they’re working on right now. I’m teaching them to work on the poems they will have in a year, if they stay with it.

I have drafts, and I know what I love about this first rough thing that I’ve written, but I know it’s not done for literally a year. Some can come sooner than that, but it can be literally be a year, because I have so many poems going at once, and what I don’t want to do is get to the point where I’m rushing a poem. Once I rush a poem, I freeze it in a certain place. If I take my time with it, it has the time and the process to become what it wouldn’t in its own time.

That’s why when somebody goes, “Just tell me how to fix this poem,” all I can do is say what I’d do. You can send it off and see if somebody wants to take it. But I’m really not teaching you to work on this poem in front of you right now. Whatever I tell you that’s worthwhile will be there when you’re drafting a new poem in six-months, or when you’re finishing that new poem six-months after that.

DJ: Another thing Hugo talks about, and I’d like to move into your process when you’re on the page with this, is the triggering topic, or the triggering subject, allowing yourself to move free of that trigger and go where the poem takes you. In many of your poems, you prove very fluent at this. A number of them meander in this very fluid way that never feels forced, and I never feel lost. The poem takes me where I wasn’t expecting it to go at the start. The picture develops in a panoramic sense. You start here, everything stays within the frame but the borders continue to expand. Do you ever find yourself fighting to keep the poem going in something of a straight line, and how do you safeguard against expectations to allow the poem to take you where it’s going to go?

JM: That’s a difficult question because I don’t watch myself like that. I really honor what Hugo says about triggering towns, but I don’t understand it. I really love what Robert Bly says about leaping poetry, or what frenetic stuff experimental writers can get into, but I might be a little more dull than all of that. (Laughs)

DJ: OK. For instance then, in “My Neighbor’s Dog,” I read the start as a scene poem between you and the neighbor. I get a feeling for that relationship. The poem then transforms into this wonderful play of language, off the word “being,” which is the name of the dog. Then you have all those meanings a reader could throw at “being,” which you’ve connected with through the manifestation of this dog. Then the last stanza takes this almost melancholic turn where it becomes this bit of wisdom that’s being passed from father to son. I could not have anticipated this poem that began as this scene poem would have ended there. So to distill the previous question, at what point does the poem take over and you step aside?

JM: You’ve gotten it in the play of that language. Once I followed that thread, and trusted stuff that for a long time wasn’t en vogue, which is a lot of repetition. Keep hammering on a word until it takes different shape, which is what we do every day in language. Typically, the more you say a word the more it changes, the more it has a life.

There’s some real life, which is foolish, but real life in that first stanza. And in fact, I had a professor of philosophy who joked about naming his dog Being. He was a sympathetic character, but not all that likable a character. He was kind of nasty character. And I’ve never much liked Lewis Finch either – I just kind of got along with Lewis Finch – who appears as a boy in the poem.

DJ: Is that someone…

JM: From my childhood.

DJ: So he’s always a child?

JM: If you take…I don’t even know if I had a son when I started writing that poem. But you look back at me as a college student with this professor who’s now an adult with me. And I have a son, though I don’t even know if I had a son then. I’m also casting back into my own childhood, and framing sort of my son as me. A lot of what is happening, you know, you find stuff that interests you or intrigues you or compels you in your everyday walking around life, but who knows what shapes they will take on the page. There’s also the image – and I don’t know how I feel about it – of driving home and being caught in traffic. That probably happened the day before. And that’s not the strongest part of the poem, it may have been something that, had I worked on the poem a bit more, might have come out. It may also have been the trigger.

I think it’s important to always be willing to give up what generated the poem, but I don’t know that I always do that, and if I do, it’s because I’ve hit upon language that lets me step away. I think I even mention it in “Evening Dress”. That’s certainly one where I didn’t know where I was going. And the poem is pretty much language driven. All I have there is my love, and regard for my 12-year-old son, and I’m telling him something really rather adult, something he won’t really need, you know, at the time, for 10-years, 15-years. I didn’t know where that poem was going to go. In fact I still look back and wonder, “Did this wind up in the right place?”

DJ: Getting back to the education, how do you convey what you just said to a novice writer, or someone who’s in your class for the first time, whether a young writer or…

JM: The short answer is process. I tell them it takes me forever to finish a poem. And they may be touched by God and finish poems right away, but I doubt it. There may be a couple of people in the world that finish a poem right away. What I say is, if you are willing to draft your poems, you are willing to get better. And you’re willing to have confidence that you’re headed in the right direction. I think if you take a finished poem and compare it to the first draft – although I really have no interest in doing that – I think you’ll say, “My gosh. Look how far away I got from the trigger. And I didn’t know it.” Sometimes we get stuck thinking, “This poem has to turn.” Well, yeah, it will. If you spend time with it. Or it really wasn’t a poem in the first place. You just thought it was going to be a poem.

In order to step away from the trigger, be willing to spend time with the poem, simply by saying, “This draft today is probably not much better than tomorrow’s draft.” It’s a way of showing patience with the poem and letting it become what it wants to be.

DJ: I’d like to ask you about “Spinoza and the Morning”, and the difference between it and “My Neighbor’s Dog”, where you took these instances and moved them into a single episode so that it reads like one unfolding moment. In “Spinoza,” you take three distinct periods and bring them together in one scene just as fluidly. There’s the deathbed, there’s the college scene, there’s you and the coworker. Yet the poem remains contained, and distills into that beautiful line, “Faster than thought, light swept toward us.” In the midst of exploring and allowing any poem to go where it will go, do you ever come up for air all of the sudden and say, “Where the hell am I?”

JM: If I’m writing a 60-line poem, do I ever stop at line 35 and think, “My God, what’s going to happen?” Maybe, but I think my answer is No. I don’t stop on line 35. I go to line 60, and then I think, “Hmmm, I wonder what this poem’s about?” And that’s what I mean by it being a series of drafts. I may be wrong, but I worked on that poem a long time. It’s also a very important poem to me. I think there was a time when it was in three sections, which means there was a time before that when it was all one. Then I went to three sections. Then I realized it was too abrupt or discordant to go from section one to two, so I took those out again.

To think about, process wise, how that happened, I was probably saying, “My gosh, I have a poem with all these chunks in it. Maybe I ought to treat them like chunks.” When I chunked them, I probably developed those chunks more. Then I’m sure I went, “You know, it’s not moving. I need to take those chunks out.” Then I probably had a challenge for a while with, “How do I transition without beating somebody over the head or being prosaic?” You never know.

One reason why I kept at that poem was because it was important to me. It all is of the question, “How does morning begin?” Which is how I felt the very early morning, the middle of the morning, after my father-in-law passed away. I thought, “This night could go on forever. We’re not hungry. We’re not moving around. We don’t know what to do. It’s too early to get the body. We’re stuck.” It was my mother-in-law, my wife and myself. I thought, “How does morning come?” I probably had a couple more memories about seeing the sun come up in different places. It does happen, but in that moment I didn’t know how.

DJ: In that poem you took “father-in-law” and spelled it out in the more personal “father”.

JM: It got clunky to have all the relationships in there as they really were. And it didn’t really matter. In that moment, my father-in-law was my father. My mother-in-law was my mother. On the human level, that stuff doesn’t matter. Was I going to stick with, “my mother-in-law, my father-in-law”? I’m not going to stick to that. To what end? To be accurate? That wasn’t helpful.

DJ: And it’s not the meaning of the poem.

JM: It wasn’t helping me move. Fundamentally those are clunky. It might be an interesting challenge to write, with all those relationship titles in there. I had other things to do. I wanted to get onto the next poem.

John C. Morrison’s poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including the Seattle Review, the Cimarron Review, and Southern Poetry Review. Most recently, he directed the Writers in the Schools program for Literary Arts or Oregon, and currently teaches poetry at Washington State University, Vancouver. His first full-length collection of poems, Heaven of the Moment, is a finalist in the 2008 Oregon Book Awards for poetry, and three of the poems below (“Evening Dress,” “My Neighbor’s Dog,” and “Spinoza and the Morning”) are included in the collection.

Evening Dress

for my son

One day the sky will open,
promise, like there’s a zipper
invisible from our side. One

long zip from zenith,
where cirrus clouds curve
mare tail strands, down

to the horizon, green peaks
of distant spruce trees. What’s next?
What’s behind? No, it’s not

a giant pant fly, God’s prick
ready to douse our world, his infinite
love and patience at end. No.

Promise. The sleek zipper
belongs to the back of a long
dress. From sweet wisps at cool nape

down to dimple a tip of the tongue
above the buttocks. While everyone
goes about their day in cars,

on sidewalks, in dusty offices,
all beholden to a dull script,
you will see what to reach for

as the dress slips off into evening,
into darkness. Promise. Close your eyes,
draw her close, breathe stars.

My Neighbor’s Dog

Better for me had my neighbor died
before we began to drink out our nights
at a table stained with red wine:
his eyes, two tight circular syllogisms,
two eight balls rolled back black and white
into his head. The old philosopher
who named his dog Being. Capital B,
Being. His colleagues at every
university struggle with phantom
answers. Professor Tiederman dismisses
them as alchemists and names Being,
discovers Being becoming, Being,
which wasn’t and now is, Being
born in a litter of nine retrievers.

And the world, roundly, makes too much sense,
like looking in your rearview
after a long day at the end
of a long, straight street to see
slow traffic laid out behind you:
braided silver glinting wet
in the sunlight through clouds. You say
how wonderful to sit still beside
a black van pumping country rock
at an interminable stoplight
and then be here: woven in the bright braid,
and then be here. Being is like that,
halfway in my tipped garbage can
one minute; the next, shredding
in his bird-soft mouth my copy
of the daily Oregonian.

I’m home Sunday, ignoring my headache
from La Salles, ignoring the sticky smell
of Chianti in my sinuses, the smell
of Tiederman’s tedious chatter,
his illicit flurries while his wife,
sweet Janice, sits home warming her feet
under the belly of Being,

Being. Ignore it all because my son
shouldn’t see his old man drunk
or marred by wine. Better for him to play
street football unencumbered while I rake leaves
and the leavings of Being, lean
against the sweetgum and watch his team
huddle for a second down call.
Read the lips on my son, the light receiver,
he’s telling Tiederman’s boy Lewis,
that foul-mouthed shit, Throw it to me
on a fly pattern. Bent over at their hips,
the five study the line my son
draws on his dirty palm, a crisp line
up the gutter to the Hubner’s driveway.
The quarterback Lewis, always the arbiter
of cruel mediocrity, says
loudly enough for Being to hear
and howl out back, Fuck you. Everyone
goes short. Listen to him, son. Listen
hard. Listen to Being scratch at the fence gate.

Spinoza and the Morning

The surgeon knotted sutures one step
too slow to seal the net of vessels
oozing around his heart. Mother

rocked, framed by a window
shining on the penultimate hour.
Stunned, stuck like the late night

was clear pitch, I watched the dark
for sign of morning. Young, at school
I’d write for philosophy and push up

from the kitchen chair to step outside,
breathe, and see the strange stars
spun to us from the other hemisphere

and return with less time to Spinoza,
the lens grinder who taught relentless trust.
By morning when I packed my papers

in my bag and started toward campus,
I was drunk on exhaustion and his axiom
that we are God thinking. So let God learn regret.

A few years later at work, the other janitor
and I scrubbed floors, toilets, grime inside
light fixtures so close to sunrise, he insisted

we have the light find us facing west
and the great Sacramento Valley.
The streets were empty as we drove, reckless,

balancing large paper cups of dark beer
through the dim. We outlived our folly.
Spinoza wouldn’t survive the glass dust

that lacerated his lungs. Dad,
bloated by another four liters of saline,
another twenty pounds of pressure to give his heart

traction, ceased, and three of us, quiet
as dust in the room, struggled to remember
how day begins. Those years before

out of the car and up the rocky hill’s dirt path,
my friend and I turned to see
already it was bright morning across the river

in the towns of Fruto and Chrome. We stood
in the shadow of the Sierra
watching the wall of light careen our way,

emblazing pools of distant rice fields
and the deep green of almond orchards.
Faster than thought, light swept toward us,

claiming creek and stones, onto us
and over us, a wind from heaven to warm
our backs, lay our shadows in the grass.

Our Brother the Rain

More than ascribes to
more than holds to
more than maintains
the rain
the rain insists.
We go quiet
mortified
even ashamed for the rain
who pushes
pushes the point
that was never really in question
that was only ever a friendly call
for clarification
and we were all
more than completely clear
a cloudburst back
a silvery syllogism long ago
and at that moment
the rain had a point
well-made
well-put
a bon-mot
well-taken
and now a point long since
conceded
one the rain made first softly
deliberately but gently
then with increasing vigor
until we have no choice
but admit the mania
of our brother the rain
who will finish by weeping
our brother the rain
who blusters toward torrential
deaf to our deep hush.

Last Work

For my strain of cancer, after
surgery, radiation was perfunctory,
a mopping up of the most likely dead
and gone. Unless a car or some other great
stroke of dark luck took me,
I’d live through my youth to have
a few amber years to shuffle

on the sidewalk, an old man
in the luscious summer shade. But what
about the already elderly men around
the waiting room like around

a campfire, ringed by forest-green drapes,
the quiet eerie as the secret heart
of a temple? We would arrive
at the clinic in street clothes and emerge
from behind the cloth wall to join
the circle in a faded but sterile gown.

In conversation, they were
always onto a project, new circuitry
for the basement, laying a slab
of smooth concrete. Each man

had a bit better than 50/50
and in one sentence I’ll teach you
about both odds and faith:
Within a year half would rise
glorified, the rest would remain

on our planet with me but have
a clean garage, the mower slick-
oiled and blade-sharp, and be ready
for a lonely, languorous recovery.