Joseph Millar’s poetry spoke to me the instant I opened his first collection, Overtime (Eastern Washington University Press, 2001), a book that spans across the great American landscape and touches upon everything from fathers and sons to the telephone lines. As Millar mentioned when we spoke, the poems in Overtime seem to possess the sense of “good faith” despite struggle. While the poems exist on the page as if they were happening in the moment, his recent collection, Fortune (EWU Press, 2007), expresses a deeply reflective voice, and demonstrates Millar’s connection to music and the musicality of his verse.

After living in the Bay Area in many years, then briefly in Oregon, Millar and his wife, the poet Dorianne Laux, currently reside in North Carolina. I caught up with Millar during the winter 2009 Pacific University MFA gathering in Seaside, Oregon. The first part of our interview is from a talk he gave with the poet Marvin Bell.

(JM): We all have to confront the blank page. In a poem – and I suppose stories and novels are like this too – it’s like a song. I was reading Dylan’s Chronicles the other day, and he says that writing a song is like entering a strange country. I thought that was profound. You’re not exactly sure what the language is or where anything is. You’re wandering a little bit. You’re looking around.

Maybe something’s pushing on you. Maybe you want to go north, or you know that it’s starting to be a poem about someone who’s left you, or someone who’s just been born. Maybe you don’t know what it’s about. So you write down something that’s happening right in front of you. Maybe it’s the rain on the grass. Then you can’t think of anything else, and you start to make a song out of it.

Chances are you’ve developed certain patterns and habits of conducting yourself in this strange land. The poem may tend to follow off in your way of doing things. If you’ve been at it long enough and have developed these habits, one of them may take over.

One of the things we should do in our poems is to “go there, beyond the woods.” And one of the ways to do that is to try to avoid these patterns of entry into the strange land. Lately I’ve been doing little rhymers, almost as a kind of joke. Some of us were writing together and I couldn’t think of anything. Marvin (Bell) likes to say, “Music always wins” – if there’s a competition between sense and sound, between the message of the words and the music of the words, the music wins every time. So one possibility is that you become childlike and start to goof around. Instead of telling a story, you sing a song.

Some part of this passes our understanding. We’re not going to completely understand it when we’re writing, and this needs to be OK with us. We don’t need to be that smart to be writers. It’s a different part of the human that makes both song and story. It’s not the same as the smart part that gets you to be the valedictorian. That’s good. In fact, a lot of times, the element that makes you a poet or a writer is the part that’s held out of the “A” group, the advanced group, the “in-crowd” of whatever world you’re in. The part of you that wasn’t the best looking, wasn’t the best athlete, didn’t have enough money. The part of you that was held out is the part that makes you able to hear the song inside yourself. The part that can play by itself a little bit, make up little songs, move the chairs around.

You’ve seen it happen in prose, poetry, fiction…the writing just lifts up off the page. The journey stops, freezes up, and the writing lifts up into song, sound and lyric.

It’s a huge thing when you sit down with your little self, you open the page and you say, “OK, look here, the rain on the grass….or whatever. It’s this huge, vast thing. We go there not in the spirit of confrontation but in the spirit of humility and the hope that something good happens. And we go there even if we’re afraid nothing good will happen and we’re tired. We just go there. That’s the way you get something. By going there, opening the page and making marks on it.

You’re trying to put a spell on yourself, to hypnotize yourself, to go under a little bit. You don’t want to be sitting there in the same frame of mind as if you were reading directions on how to put something together. It’s a different way of being, and a different way of thinking. You’re trying to lower your conscious restrictor. And some people are better at this, naturally. It’s a knack that can be practiced, and like most practice, it works best if you get a regularity or rhythm going with it. The unconscious relates to rhythm the same way a kids goes, ‘Oh, it’s 10 o’clock. Time for milk and cookies. Then we go out in the yard. Then we come in and lie down.’ For us, it’s like, ‘I’m going to open my notebook now. This is my chair. This is my light. Now I’m going to practice.’

After you’ve been doing this for a while, something takes over besides just your thinking. A lot of times, when you lower (the thinking) part of you down a bit, surprising things happen. Strange sounds come out. Strange cries arise from the back. That’s where you’re trying to get to. It’s something you learn by practicing.

(DJ): Your subjects are often deeply humanistic, of the earth, blue collar. The poems in Overtime especially feel like they have a lot of history to them.

(JM): Those poems go back to the 80s, and the experiences are even older than that. I didn’t have much time to really sit down and write poems every day, or work on them every day. Or I didn’t make the time. By ’97 I had a bunch of the poems already, but it took about four-years after that.

In Fortune, my chops are a little better, but another thing is that, a lot of the poems in the first book were written during an intense period of disorientation, single-fatherhood, craziness and big changes in my life. Mainly being suddenly single with an eight-year-old to raise and his big sister who was in high school, and all of us being in this weird place. I was exposed in a strange way, and the poems in Overtime came out of that. With Fortune, I had more time and my chops became a little better. I learned more technical stuff. It’s not covering as long a period of time. And my life wasn’t so (messed) up. That’s the difference in the two books.

I was less pleased with the poems in Fortune for a long time. Then I said, ‘Well, you know, they’re pretty good.’

(DJ): What was it you found less pleasing?

(JM): I felt like I was complaining a lot in that book. Here I have this great life and all I could do is piss and moan. I was thinking, ‘What’s up with that?’ And I’d talk with people about that, and they’d say, ‘Well, look Joe, you take what they’re giving you. Don’t worry about it. Maybe you’re pissing and moaning because you couldn’t do it before.’ I couldn’t afford to, sort of. Maybe that was it. It just seemed like the outlook was more bleak, stripped out and existential. The first book seemed like it had more good faith in it. More struggling good faith. Later I kind of forgave myself and thought, ‘That’s what I got. That’s the way it is.’

To some extent you take what they’re giving you, make poems out of it and try not to judge yourself. You can judge your technique in the poem and try to improve that. And you can judge the poem on whether it’s good or bad. But for the mode of expression, the thing that’s driving the poem…you know, we all have different parts and that’s it.

(DJ): In Overtime, there’s a deep tenderness between the characters in these poems – you and the father, you and the son. When you were living in this time, what was your process of getting things out. Were you stealing time? Or did you find yourself in the moment with something triggering you?

(JM): Both. I’d write at night. I’d write in the truck at work.

(DJ): You were working in a crew?

(JM): I was foreman by the time I quit. Sometimes I’d put my guys to work somewhere and park a mile and a half away, sit near the Bay and go back in an hour and a half to see how they were doing.

(DJ): Did people know you were writing?

(JM): No. I hid it from them. If they came up to my truck and I was writing I’d cover it up in a newspaper or something else.

(DJ): Why?

(JM): I didn’t want to hear anything about it. I didn’t want to give that part of myself away.

(DJ): It doesn’t really fit…

(JM): The blue collar, macho…you know, the whole deal. And then later my guys went and bought Overtime and were like, ‘Hey man you were writing those poems about us!’

(DJ): Who were you reading?

(JM): I was reading Merwin, Phil Levine. He’s a national treasure. He’s the one who gave permission to so many of us to write these poems. Of course I feel it’s a privilege to be able to write poems at all.

(DJ): As a younger man, when did you start going toward writing?

(JM): I wanted to be a novelist in college. I went to Penn State for a couple of years.

(DJ): When?

(JM): Back in ’63 and ’64. There were all these great novels about personal freedom. Novels like Henderson the Rain King, A Fan’s Notes, The Ginger Man. They were all about personal freedom. I could never…it’s such a different way of imagining things. I joke with fiction writers about it all the time because I love that.

I didn’t start writing poems until I graduated, came out west to California in ’67. Then I started writing poems. I knew I couldn’t write fiction. I couldn’t think of a plot. So I started writing personal impressions that turned into poems.

(DJ): Some writers either don’t want to or don’t know if they can access certain things. Do you feel that the narrator of a poem is always necessarily the writer?

(JM): It is for me. There’s a big part of me in all my poems. I don’t think that’s true for everyone. For me it is. All these things about the unstable “I” and the fractionalized first person…to me, I write poems because I’m alive and I like how it makes me feel to do it. Maybe I’ll change. Occasionally I’ll do a persona poem, or I’ve been writing these bestiary poems, but they all have some big part of me in them. I’m imbedded in the much maligned “I”.

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.