I wasn’t familiar with Henry Hughes’ work until a local poet, Celeste Thompson, introduced us. His second full-length collection, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books) arrived shortly thereafter, and I was quickly wrapped up in Hughes’ use of language, as well as the clever and playful way his poems approached topics around intimacy and human relationships. A professor of English and Creative Writing at Western Oregon University, Hughes and I met briefly at Wordstock, then got together at a Portland coffee house were we sat under the front awning and watched the rain come and go. Our conversation started with Hughes’ role as a poetry critic and reviewer for Harvard Book Review, then circled back to his own work.

HH: I feel dead about some current poetry.

DJ: How so?

HH: A lot of it feels like it’s just been ground out of the poetry machine. And poets will speculate. I’m not particularly curmudgeonly about “the death of American poetry.” Some people blame workshops, or just the overly democratic poem, or the overly accessible poem, or even the overly inaccessible poem.

DJ: When you’re doing a review, do you have to jump out of your sensibilities of “This is how I write, this is not how I write?”

HH: Sometimes it’s about wearing the intellectual cap and being the more objective critic. Sometimes it’s just about being open-minded to different styles. Like in music or the visual arts, which I pay a lot of attention to, I like a lot of different things. I’m not someone who has to have this certain kind of thing, this certain kind of genre or style, or else I get turned off. I tend to have very broad tastes, which is helpful in writing reviews. Sure, in the end, who I am as a writer, and what I think is really great, or what I really love, is going to play into a review. I think we expect that out of our critics and editorialists. We want to hear their opinions.

I like writing reviews. They break me out of….you know, when you’re writing a poem, you have to really believe that you’re writing the most beautiful thing in the world. I really think that. You should love the stuff you’re writing. Otherwise you should change it, because obviously it’s not really and completely you. When you write a poem, you should say, “This f—ing poem is great.” At least in that moment. And the next day, if you still think it’s great, then you got something. In reviewing, you really have to back off from that love of your work.

DJ: Backing off from that, even if the poem you’re reading doesn’t come across as a great poem, you still have to do…what?

HH: You have to look for what is admirable in the work. Is it doing something that you can’t do? Is it doing something well? Is it making you think about something? Is it handling syntax in a way that’s very athletic and inventive, yet is still intelligible?

If this were a scientific evaluation, you could apply different tests and apparati and get interesting readings. So I try to think of it from these other angles.

DJ: Have you ever gotten any backlash on a review?

HH: I don’t really pan anybody. If I really dislike a book, I pass on it. You know how it goes…in the world of journalism, if you don’t like something, then the thought is that you should just trash it. They certainly do in reviews of theater in the NY Times, and occasionally in the book reviews.

Not often, but once in a while you’ll see someone really really trash a book. I don’t do that. Let someone else do that. I don’t know…maybe I’m a coward.

DJ: Or you’re being fair.

HH: Well, if I can’t say something more sophisticated than, “I hate this book,” then I don’t really need to say anything.

DJ: And you get positive response.

HH: I get a few emails from time to time. Most of the time I don’t hear back. I’m not really networked, I suppose. I have reviewed a number of major poets. Merwin most recently. I’d love to get a note from W.S. Merwin that says, “I read your review and you had some insightful things to say.” That’s my ego, too. But also, maybe it would be sustaining. Like anything with poetry, we don’t get paid much.

I hear back from people who read the reviews…students and people doing dissertations. So I do get follow-up questions. It’s nice to know that I may be part of the dialogue. That’s why I like reviewing. You’re part of the conversation. It’s nice to be there.

DJ: To be there…there’s also the passion of being part of it all. You mentioned ego; it’s nice to be acknowledged for what it is, but there’s also that simple desire to be in the pool, so to say, just because you like how the water feels.

HH: That’s right.

DJ: I think that drives a lot of the interconnectedness of being associated with poetry on any number of levels. As a reviewer, a writer, a networker.

What are your writing funks like?

HH: My only problem with writing is finding the time. The world would love for you not to write. The world would love for you to take out the garbage, mow the lawn, do more service at the university, be better prepared for your classes, paint your house, call your father, write that letter to your friend who you haven’t returned the letter to in three years. The world always demands those things of you, and you have to say “No.” That’s my biggest battle.

DJ: Saying no?

HH: Saying no and finding the time to work consistently. Right now I have about two mornings a week. I have one full day. I go out to my house in Falls City on a Tuesday afternoon. I have Wednesday morning, all day Wednesday and maybe Thursday morning where I’m not disturbed. I don’t even have email out there. No student stuff, no family stuff even. Although if something comes up, I have to be there for my wife and step-sons.

Most people don’t live that way. Most people are not artists. For a long time, I was embarrassed to even say I was an artist. It sounded egotistical. It sounded pretentious. . . “Oh, I’m an arteest.” I didn’t like that, but I’ve learned I actually have to think that way.

DJ: Do you ever have any trouble calling yourself a poet?

HH: I used to be embarrassed by that. Now I say it. But I’m careful. I still don’t have cards that say, “Henry Hughes, Writer.” Some people do. Or stationary, or web sites full of their enchanted gardens.

Being an artist in busy America, or anywhere, is challenging. That’s my biggest obstacle. I’ve always loved to write. What are your funks?

DJ: I was trying to get the last layer on a poem that involves a firewalk. Earlier drafts would get to the firewalk…the poem would resolve after the firewalk, but I was skipping the walk itself. I’ve never done a firewalk.

The poem is highly imaginative, but I kept getting to that same place. It was one of the few occasions where I actually knew what I was avoiding. So I took a day off…and this is a meaningful poem to me. I was grinding on it. I took a day off and went to hang out at an artist friend’s studio. I was hanging out with her and another friend of hers. I was just sort of soaking up this feminine energy, I guess. I told them about the poem and they said, “Just shut up and write it.”

HH: Best advice I’ve ever heard.

DJ: The next day I went for a hike, just kept staying away from it, then I came home and wrote out the firewalk. The funk there, I guess, was that I kept grinding and getting to the same place, knowing exactly what I had to do but not knowing my way through it.

HH: Most people would stop at that grind, and they would finish the poem and that would be it, or they’d never finish it. A real writer goes back to it again and again. After a long hike…after a number of years. I don’t think you were in a funk. I think you were in a place that required another full flight of stairs, another few swings of the pick, another hundred miles. I know that place well. Even people who write every day get to those places. They probably get to them more often. That’s where, you know, we need time to work.

DJ: How long were you in Asia?

HH: I was in Japan for three years and China for two years.

DJ: Is there a carryover of that Asian aesthetic into your work?

HH: To some degree. The East Asian aesthetic, which I’ve always admired, has found its way into some of my writing, and certainly into the way I just, you know, keep my room a little more stark and simple, the way I look at painting. There’s a certain austerity, especially of Japanese forms and of some Chinese too, that certainly is present.

I’m very interested in East Asian history and culture. It really woke me up to the world. Prior to that I had never really traveled, except for drunken exploits in Mexico or to Canada for fishing. This really woke me up to a whole other world, and politics, and poverty, and beauty, and time, and history. That changed my writing, and made me, I feel, a much better human being.

DJ: That was before Men Holding Eggs?

HH: Yes. There are Japan and China poems in there, and there are many poems in that collection that were informed by the experience.

DJ: I wanted to ask about what seems like a uniqueness I’ve seen in your work, and “Parking Lot in Portland” is a great example. Sometimes your lines go way out in this fanning sort of way. Can you tell me a little bit about that? What are you hoping for with that style, whether you’re looking for something more from the story itself or something else, and if this was something you were doing in Men Holding Eggs.

HH: Less so in the first book. I think Moist Meridian is a more mature book, and I feel a deeper sense of rhythm and the mind’s music, as I call it.

Many of my poems are stories. An easy way to tell a story in a poem is to write a narrative poem. Good old William Stafford, “Traveling Through the Dark,” or Donald Hall, take you out to grandpa’s farm sort of stuff. I do a lot of that in Men Holding Eggs. I like the narrative poem. I grew up with James Dickey and Dick Hugo. I just wanted to tell stories in cool sounding language that did some funky things, that transformed in places I wasn’t expecting. I couldn’t write fiction all that well. It wasn’t that interesting somehow. People didn’t really like it.

If I’m going to write stories in poems, then what can I do? One thing I do is I start of kind of slow, kind of tentative. I start reaching…reaching…reaching. The line seems to reach. I find that that’s kind of the way I read them too. I gain momentum and kind of stretch out to the margin. I guess I’m approaching prose, at least in the spirit, not so much in the rhythmic motions, but in the spirit of wanting to tell a complete story.

Then I kind of come back. I’m going to close it off. I’m not going to write a novel. I’m going out to tell you something and I’m going to come back.

It feels natural. I’m not the kind of poet that sits down and says, “I’m going to write a sonnet, or I’m going to write a villanelle,” or God forbid a pantoum or something. I really write what I want to say, and then end up looking at the lines after. It seems to me that I’ve found this motion naturally. I say this unpretentiously. I wasn’t taught to do it. I’m not trying to emulate someone or some style. I’m sure critics can look at it and say, “Oh, well, that’s a C.K. Williams line that’s been truncated front and back.” That’s for critics to do. To me, it just feels right.

DJ: You used the word ‘motion’. There is that motion to it, from what I’ve noticed. The book as a whole…there’s a lot of sailing in there.

HH: Yes, yes.

DJ: So going from the title then inward, there’s a water quality to a lot of what’s happening in the collection.

HH: I love water.

DJ: The poems feel as if they go out like waves and then come back. When you first started to write in that form, did you try to stop it at all, or find yourself saying, “What the hell is this?”

HH: No. I just rode the wave.

I’m not very resistant to a lot of things in my life. I tend to go with things. I’m a very flexible person. If a group of us is going out for dinner, I’m pretty easy. I’ll walk pretty far. It doesn’t bother me. Or I’ll stop right here. I’ll eat Mexican, I’ll eat Chinese, I’ll go to a gay bar, I’ll go to a straight bar. It doesn’t bother me.

I feel that way about certain motions in my writing too. I don’t really resist them.

When you edit, you have to cut things back, because there’s a lot of bullshit and clunky exposition in there. Then you have to be tough with yourself. It’s like cleaning out the closet.

But in terms of my original creative process, if it feels right, I just kind of go with it.

As for others…I can see sort of the neo-formalists saying, “Henry Hughes is rather undisciplined,” or, “Just more free verse. Where’s the rhyme, where are the metrics?”

I don’t care. Clem Starck, with whom I read at Wordstock, he said something wonderful at one of our readings. He’s a great and interesting man.

He said, in response to a question about formalism, “It’s fine if you want to write formal poetry, and I admire form. But it’s hard enough just to write in very spare language, in a minimal number of lines, something meaningful and still sound human.” That’s a paraphrase, but he said it at one of our readings when someone asked a question, and it makes so much sense to me.

I want to say something meaningful, I want to say it in as few lines as possible, and I want to sound human. If I have any artistic agenda, it’s to sound human but not careless.

–

Read five poems from Moist Meridian, as well as a review of the collection. Watch Henry Hughes and Clem Stark read at Wordstock 2009.

Henry Hughes grew up in Long Island, and has lived in Oregon since 2002. He currently teaches at Western Oregon University. The poems in his most recent book, Moist Meridian (© 2009, Mammoth Books), come to life on the page through Hughes’ ecstatic voice and willingness to be both playful and sublime. His first collection, Men Holding Eggs (© 2004; Mammoth) won the 2004 Oregon Book Award for poetry. Hughes’ commentary on new poetry appears regularly in Harvard Review. The following poems from Moist Meridian appear here with his permission.

SKELETON PIRATES OF AMERICA

Oil drunk,
masts gnawed away,
we burn black slicks
for a Chinese cargo of toys.

Never dead enough, juggling
cannonballs and Arabs,
brown galley boys
fry fat
to fill our clothes.

Unpaid women pinch
note-wrapped rats between the planks,
and the sun
burns so hot

even sharks
can’t digest the shimmering curse.
I’m George, says the air-conditioned captain.
See all the blue
for my eyes.

DEVIL KNOWS DIFFERENT

Watching them gulp
garbage and skinny eels–two gaunt sharks,
open-mouthed in appeal–I nod,
they pass.

Now, you. You come back with me.
Smell the salt, the oily churn of a twin-screw cruiser,
drunk and wide as the Fifties.
See your parents, the sandy woman
and sable rodded man, telling you to feel the bite,
feel it.

Feel the flounder’s deck-flutter,
taste its whiteness. All the baked clams,
boiled lobsters and barbecued bass
they’ve eaten and served
to fuel the business of living,
of making you.

Parents gone now. It’s your chance
to feed your teenage daughter
more than money. Umbrella beach days without her mom.
Your lectures still too hot to bear.
She wades the blonde bar, waving to a yacht. Sharp sharks
shilling into the scent
between her legs. People say, What we eat
can’t imagine being eaten
Devil knows different.

NEW YEAR’S WITH CHRISTINE

Transmission busted. It’s late
and I have to drive home alone, in reverse,
from Saint Mary’s singles dance,
Bing’s White Christmas on AM.
I see the first small snow
in my taillights, and in ten minutes
the defrost sweats off a storm.
Flakes blow up
finding clouds again.

What if I kept rolling,
New Year’s Day, 1982. Driving us
in love, silly, still drunk
down that terrible hill to your house,
sliding in crystal terror
over the curb

into Neil Cohen’s handsome snowman.
His bottom sphere smushed gray
and that broom jammed in our bumper.
I held his crunchy head,
lifted that gold pipe
and said, Here, have a smoke. And you knelt,
suddenly knowing
to wear that hat meant change.
And you put it on.

HOW I FOUND THE SKY

It was the only time
my father asked me for anything.
Why don’t ya make me a duck for da office?
It was the only time I went to the library
for a book: Waterfowl of North America.
And it was the only time moribund Mr. Brown
gave me a decent piece
of unknotted pine, and put his coffee down
to show me how to bandsaw
without losing a finger.

I cut those penciled lines,
shaped the block, hollowed the center,
glued the body, shaved the head’s fragile bill
and narrow crest, leaving those buffed cheeks–
some ruddy joy
a lonely bird might fly to on a cold morning.
Joy? I don’t know.
I was rasping through recessed confusion,
burning in feathers, drilling shallow sockets
for the glassy red eyes of high school.

And when I carried that blond mallard
through the halls, it was the only time
beautiful Miss Herman, the art teacher
I loved and failed for three terms, spoke to me
of colors: burnt umber, raw sienna, cobalt blue
brushed across the folded wings.

MOVING

We were friends
years before
the night among the boxes,
unlabeled for fast stacking in the old pickup.
We’re not finished, I said.
There’s wine, and I’m not taking it with me.
Tipping that last ocean view,
you said, I’ll miss you so much, before that half-light kiss
pressed a bloom
straight through the island. Our hands
sands a wave makes
without music, without a bed. A motion
awaited, undressing like a storm
just ahead. So close
without my glasses. Can you see? you smiled,
one hand touching my face, the other driving
the dented guardrail
over the bridge.

–
A review of Moist Meridian will appear Thursday, December 3. Our complete interview will be live on Friday, December 4.

Joseph Millar is the author of Fortune, from Eastern Washington University Press. His first collection, Overtime (2001), was finalist for the Oregon Book Award. Millar grew up in Pennsylvania, attended Johns Hopkins University and spent 25 years in the San Francisco Bay area, working at a variety of jobs, from telephone repairman to commercial fisherman. His poems have appeared in numerous magazines including TriQuarterly Review, Prairie Schooner, DoubleTake, Ploughshares, New Letters, Manoa, and River Styx. He has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts in Poetry, the Moncalvo Center for the Arts, and Oregon Literary Arts. He now lives in Raleigh, North Carolina, with his wife, poet Dorianne Laux, both of whom are on the faculty of Pacific University’s MFA in Writing program. His poems are published here with his permission.

HOMEMADE KILN
      from Fortune

We humped the fire bricks eight steps down
into the root cellar, laid them up
with castable mortar, the drawings
in Pottery Magazine: archway, damper,
recessed firebox, fuel line fed
from a number two diesel drum
resting above in the grass. We loaded
the pots glazed with cobalt and gold,
laughing and passing a fifth
of Jim Beam. That year my drinking
would land me in jail, I’d wreck
two cars and a five-year marriage
while everywhere the gas crunch choked off
the pumps. Ford’s Pinto with its
exploding gas tank selling into the millions,
Nixon and Iacocca shaking hands on TV.
Soldiers came back from Vietnam,
raspy, thin, haunting the unemployment lines,
hitching rides under freeway bridges
smoking their monster dope in the rain.

We fired the kiln for thirty-two hours
while we drank and played cards, passed
out and slept, while the bright flame growled
and sang to itself. Until both shelves
melted and the pots all fell, broken except
for one yellow vase, shining intact
in the rubble. The new moon rose and set
like a stone over battered fields of Maryland corn,
the pond bottom’s silts, red mud of streambeds
hardened like limestone and flint.
We had nothing to sell, nothing to show,
shoveling burnt shards into the trash.
Cattle slept standing up in the pasture,
the death frost burning under their feet
and a siren began to swell in the distance,
kilos of gray ash traveling away from us:
highway ashes, ashes of flight,
ashes of worship and follow-your-bliss.

COMING HOME
      from Fortune

I’m fifty miles west of town,
a stranger driving this coal dust valley,
bottom land chopped into the river.
Bunch grass stabs its glittering arrows
up through the frozen gravel. I can
remember holidays like repeat episodes
of schizophrenia, furniture breaking
downstairs in the dark, everyone’s heads
bowed like hostages over the evening meal.
I’m passing close to the villages:
Avonmore, Saltsburg, Leechburg, Apollo.
Forgive me my history, I want to say
to those broken hills, the slow river,
it feels like it happened to someone else.
Forgive these ghost’s hands bringing you nothing,
this heart filled with cobwebs and rain.

TELEPHONE REPAIRMAN
      from Overtime

All morning in the February light
he has been mending cable,
splicing the pairs of wires together
according to their colors,
white-blue to white-blue
violet-slate to violet-slate,
in the warehouse attic by the river.

When he is finished
the messages will flow along the line:
thank you for the gift,
please come to the baptism,
the bill is now past due.

We live so much of our lives
without telling anyone,
going out before dawn,
working all day by ourselves,
shaking our heads in silence
at the news on the radio.
He thinks of the many signals
flying in the air around him,
the syllables fluttering,
saying please love me,
from continent to continent
over the curve of the earth.

NEAR THE CONTINENTAL DIVIDE
      from Overtime

I said goodbye to my father in a black Oldsmobile,
unwilling to park and linger, waiting for the flight
to Pittsburgh. It was August, almost time
for his classes, and the mountain sky was clear
over Denver as I herded the big car down
through the switchbacks, leaving the airport behind.
That night I camped by a stream in the foothills
named for a saint I’d never heard of.

I don’t think he’d planned on dying any time soon,
stumping through the terminal doors in moccasins
and shorts, the end of a dead cigarette in his teeth.
He’d insulted my poems as usual,
eaten his pork chops and eggs, leering
at the waitress when she brought the Bloody Marys.
Before he got out of the car he’d stuffed two fifties
into the ashtray and told me to keep firing.

When I was twelve I didn’t want to be President
or King of England. I didn’t want to be in movies
like my children do, lying dazed in the TV’s astral glow
listening to the guitars. I wanted hair on my arms
and big shoulders. I wanted to be a man like him,
draped in mystery. A cigar and a hat flecked with rain
singing, “If I Loved You” on the way to work, or leaning
against the Turb Club bar, relaxed and elegant,
the Racing Form in one hand and a whisky in the other,
gazing down at the horses and sighing, “Christ, Mac,
would you look at the wanton splendor of it all.”

That night in the Rockies, jumpy from five days
of drinking, I couldn’t sleep, listening to the darkness.
I wanted to tell him about the wild mustangs
at Pyramid Lake, the Northern Lights crackling across
the Yukon, ask if he thought they might be angels,
ask if it hurt him that I never came home.

My father was six miles above the earth,
Melville’s Typee in his lap, wedged into an aisle seat
and calling for another gin, the lights winking on
across the wing: red, right, returning,
and his hat pulled low
over the yoked forebones of his skull.
The next day I would drive west through deep canyons
into the splintered light of Utah,
electric dust rising from cracked blue hills
where nobody knew my name,.
Whatever it was he gave me, in the early years
after my mother died,
that fierce kindness I’d required
to believe in the world’s sudden reckonings,
was mine now. In a few months
he’d be gone.
Reagan would be President
and I’d be struggling, bankrupt, divorced.

But that night the stars came down close to the road
like the eyes of the coyote
as I cut across Nevada,
remembering how we collapsed in the snow
when the Steelers lost the title,
and laughing to myself through the darkness
all the way back to the coast.

Peter Sears is the author of two books of poems, The Brink and Tour, New & Selected Poems. He received his M.F.A. from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa and is the 1999 winner of the Peregrine Smith Poetry Contest. He currently teaches in the M.F.A. program at Pacific University. The following poems come from his most recent chapbook, Luge. .

Luge

I love snow, long gone now from the valley,
but still patching and striping the Cascade
mountains and, beyond the front range, the
white triangle of Three-Fingered Jack shining.
Makes me want to try out for luge. They hold
tryouts around the country – who knows,
there might be a senior circuit. I love the high
banking in the turns as if the luge is going to
shoot off the track. Perfect for me: push off
and pray. The motion at the start when you grip
the handles and swing back and forth in place,
that I can already do. I do it on the floor with
my cat, watching a ball game. I can learn how
to lie back down once I push off. I’m not sure
whether you steer with your hands or with
your feet. How do you hold on, though, through
the tunnel racket and see where you’re going?
If you look up, you lose speed. If you don’t
look up, you could go over a bank into a tree.
Then again, if you must go, it’s not bad, as
long as you go all the way out. Otherwise,
you’re farmed out to a faux old country-club;
you are the third guy in the second row of
rockers on the front porch, rocking gently
—there are speed limits—but you are no
trouble maker, you take your meds smiling
off the tray in your own plastic cup, and you
don’t swear or do those mating calls any more.
Your baseball cap, you pull it own because
your face has become a little pocky from too
much sun as a kid. It looks like you walked in
the wrong door of a tavern dart contest.

Dear Giant Squid

This is a fan letter. I don’t care what the Japanese scientists say,
I saw them on TV getting all excited about how they have photos
of you and almost caught you by dropping juicy bait down to
the creepy depths where you live, along with a fancy camera.
Next time, eat the camera. Their footage shows you approaching
the bait and taking it and getting caught, then dragging the line
up and down, around and around. When you finally ripped yourself
free, you lost a tentacle, which they dangled on a post as if
they had been down there fighting you with their bare hands.
What a joke! You would have wrapped them – right? – and popped
their eyeballs out. So now you know they won’t quit until they
get you. They will scrounge more money and more cameras
and more bait and more boats because that is the way
humans are, most all of them some of the time and some of
them all of the time. So you had better head down, way down,
and don’t wise off and try to take on some whale. A drawing
in a book when I was a kid showed a whale as black as the black
sea it dove down through, with its jaws open over most
of the tentacles of a giant squid, just like you, and the whale’s
eye right up next to the giant squid’s eye. Made me sick,
I turned the page, then turned back, I couldn’t help it,
those jaws closing on so many tentacles, about to chop them
like so much spaghetti. That’s how we humans are, bloodthirsty,
even when we are young and small and not so mean yet.
There is a lot about us not to like. The scientists won’t rest
until they lift you breathless out of the water and lower you
into a cage, take lots of measurements, speak in low, earnest
voices to the eager public, and shake hands all around.

Dream of Following
     with a nod to David Romtvedt

I am following my father and mother,
following them although I don’t much like
the idea, and I don’t much like

that the distance to them grows smaller,
so small I’m catching up to them. You’d think
we’d have much to say to one another.

We don’t. My father motions me
to look back over my shoulder.
There’s my daughter following me.

That’s mean of him. I want to hail her,
tell her to slow down.
But I don’t. I turn back, they’re gone.