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.