Ed Skoog has one of those minds that always seem to be working, whether he is actively crafting a poem, talking poetry with a student or another writer, or simply reflecting on the place where he currently finds himself. I caught up with him on the day of his 38th birthday. He was back home in Topeka, Kansas, getting ready for his 20th high school reunion, taking it easy in his father’s house. He was kind enough to take a few hours out of his home coming to talk about his first full-length collection, Mister Skylight (© 2009, Copper Canyon Press), to discuss craft, and to talk about the way that place and imagination coalesce to create poetry. Part 1 of our interview is below.

DJ: How’s Topeka?

ES: It’s beautiful. They’ve had a really mild summer so things are still really green. Usually by this time of year everything’s been blasted by the heat and drought. It feels like the way I like to remember it.

DJ: What does the idea of Topeka usually bring up for you?

ES: It has four pretty distinctive seasons, and two of them can be pretty rough. Summer is usually very hot. Winter is usually very cold and miserable. The nice part is usually spring, and apparently it’s felt like spring all summer.

I grew up near the middle of the city in an old leafy neighborhood. It doesn’t look like it’s in the Plains. It looks very comfortable, especially compared to my more urban and country wanderings. It’s sort of like the Shire right now.

DJ: Let’s get to your urban and country wanderings. One of the things that sticks out in Mister Skylight is that the language seems really tied to place, though at times it seems to be a number of places. At other times it seems to be a place that may not truly exist. Maybe an amalgamation of different places where you’ve lived or traveled.

When you go back to place in your process, do you find yourself going back to one place more than the other, or do things turn into a bit of a stew?

ES: I think you’re right. Even when the places have names that are accurate details, the poetry takes place in the imagination. If I say, “Topeka”, it’s different than saying “Topeka” in an essay, or than taking a picture and saying, “This is Topeka.”

There are a lot of places in the book. Some are places where I’ve lived or visited. Some of them, like the Skeleton Coast of Namibia, are places I’ve never been to. They’re all imaginary places as far as the poems go. The people in the poems are real people, the family and friends, but they become imaginary through the process of poetry.

The places mean different things to me, and have a lot of associations that, once you put them into poems, become art associations. They become aestheticize Topeka, aestheticize New Orleans, aestheticize California.

One of the animating conflicts for me in putting the book together was the struggle between looking at the place as real vs. as the poetic. Then there was the very real need to try to say something meaningful and true and honest in a social and political way about what happened in New Orleans, about what happened to my friends and the city I love and very nearly me. That was not imaginary. People died, lives were changed.

DJ: You’re referring to Katrina?

ES: Yes. The flooding and the aftermath, which made me very angry because it wasn’t an act of nature or an act of God. The levees failed because they weren’t built to spec by the Corps of Engineers. And the rescue operation was botched because of human failings and lack of courage. Suddenly that doesn’t become just an imaginary thing to play with, like my memories of Topeka. Instead, it’s something that changed my life and my way of looking at the world. At the same time, I didn’t want the book to be…I didn’t know how to write just about that. What results in the New Orleans poems, even some of the ones that I wrote before the storm, is a sort of struggle between us and the media, which doesn’t have any answers but hopefully creates interesting lines.

DJ: You said a second ago that the botched efforts and the botched recovery related to human failings and lack of courage. There’s an underlying quality in a number of your poems where it seems to be an unwavering spirit in the face of things like despair or disaster. These are the exact opposites of human failings. What does that say about you, and is that itself a comment, without being a direct comment to things?

ES: That spirit is hopefully the heart breaking impulse, the storytelling impulse and the lyric impulse to respond internally and to want to communicate that to somebody. The alternative is silence, which may be the most proper response to things, but doesn’t capture that spirit of looking back and looking around at the present, and wanting to communicate to people you are around or you wish were around. Perhaps that’s the spirit you’re finding in these poems. The impulse to dance. The impulse to draw. The impulse to do whatever it is that poems do. Whatever you’re doing in poetry…that need to be reaching out, to be expressing the joy and anxiety and imagination, and wanting or needing to share that.

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Shaindel Beers’ poetry feels like the Midwest itself – open, rolling, as if a dust storm could blow through any moment. Her first full-length collection, A Brief History of Time, captures the sadness and longing of a never-ending landscape in rich language that evokes loss, flight, grace and humility. We spoke a few weeks ago, and discussed the concept of “mental crafting” (Beers holds onto ideas for months and even years before writing them), teaching (she is a professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR), rural life (she grew up in Argos, Indiana), online publishing (she’s been poetry editor at Contrary Magazine since its founding in 2003), “short-shorts” night (as referenced in the poem A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR), and how memory and reflection lead her into verse.

DJ: You definitely have a lot going on, between your own work, your work with Contrary, what you’re doing at “the school” and your radio program (blog talk radio). Is there one area where you get greater pleasure or satisfaction?

SB: I guess everything feeds into more material to write about. It would be nice to have more free time to write. Still, I learn a lot from my students and from my other part-time jobs. They give me more time to think about writing.

DJ: A lot of your work reads in a way as if it arrived on paper exactly how it happened, almost in a “channeled” sense. I don’t mean “channeling” in a new age way, but more so like the poem came out of you in one long gush. I’m trying to get a picture of you working when suddenly you’re hit with this wave…

SB: I work a lot in my head, more than I ever write down. I wish I were one of those writers that carries a notebook and pen everywhere. I go through phases where I try to make myself do that. Sometimes something will stay in my head for months or even years before I write it down.

DJ: What finally gets you to write it down? Why does it stay so long, and what gets you to say, “I have to get this thing out?”

SB: Sometimes because it doesn’t feel finished. I’m not saying it’s a finished product in my head and then makes its way to paper. It’s like a seed. It has to germinate for a certain amount of time. Sometimes I write it down because it feels like it’s almost done, and sometimes I write it down because I’m afraid of forgetting either a part of it or the whole thing.

DJ: Would you say you’re mentally crafting pieces?

SB: I always feel like there’s a frame around things. When it feels like I have enough to build on it, that’s when it goes on paper.

DJ: So you’re never too worried that you’ll actually forget something?

SB: There are things I think I’ve forgotten.

DJ: Looking at the poem, ELEGY FOR A PAST LIFE, you mention in the second stanza:

“Back then at sixteen
I thought we’d make it out together,
and become writers.”

How long has this been going on for you, getting these lines coming to you, and at what point did writing enter your life?

SB: I probably wrote before I could physically write. When I was little, I would tell my mom stories, make her write them down then read them back to me. I was sort of a writer before I knew letters or the alphabet.

I think it was either high school or undergrad when I made that leap between wanting to be a reader and being a writer. I don’t know if I felt confident about my own work until I started having things published, first in the undergrad literary journal, then later in places right out of college.

DJ: It’s interesting that you showed up in the world as an oral storyteller, because there’s a wonderful diversity in the language of your poetry. Did you make your way to poetry from other places, or has poetry always been a place where you found a home and a voice?

SB: Some of it might be that poetry requires a shorter attention span. When I was an early teen, I remember reading my mom’s old poetry books and feeling like I could read a lot in one sitting, because mostly they were just stripes down the middles of pages. So I could read much more poetry in a short amount of time than I could, say, fiction. I feel this way about writing it also.

I’m trying to get better about spending more time at poems and fiction. I think poetry is my natural progression as a writer, then eventually I’ll move onto fiction. A lot of writers move in the same way.

DJ: So you’re actively writing things other than poetry?

SB: I have about half of a short story collection done. I need three to six more stories to be long enough to send out.

DJ: When you mention that poetry requires something of a shorter attention span, how do you say this is a benefit when it comes to online publishing? Especially when you consider the fact that there are well-regarded online literary sites and opportunities popping up all the time.

SB: I’ll sit down and read a 500-page novel in hard copy but I’d never do that on screen. I don’t know if it’s a physical issue, where staring at a screen that long isn’t good for your eyes, or if it’s a psychological issue, where we feel that things online should be short. There’s definitely something to the fact that people will only spend so long reading something online. You expect it to be no more than three screens if you’re scrolling, as if there’s an intuitive link between how long something is and how much we’re willing to read. Which is a good thing for poetry.

In general, I think people are in the mode of reading shorter fiction when they’re online. They’re more likely to read a 2,000 word story online than a 10,000 story.

DJ: Is that sort of shift completely positive?

SB: I don’t think it’s positive. It might just be one of the necessary evils that happen. I don’t want to think that we’ll be like Japan, where our literature turns into text message novels, or whatever the craze is. I hope it doesn’t go that far, but I think we have to be realistic that, if we’re sending things to an online venue, people are only going to read a poem that’s one screen, or a story of about 2,000 words.

DJ: As you’ve edited and been a reader for print and online places, could you speak to whether or not you see a different caliber of writing coming in?

SB: With Contrary, at least right now, I’m the final poetry editor. Of the 1,000 or so submissions a month, I only see the top 20 – which makes it really hard to choose. I’ve gotten things sent to me directly where I’ve felt people didn’t even look at the literary journal, but I haven’t seen any differences in quality from when I was a first reader for print to now.

DJ: Do you have any sense of shifts going on as it relates to the financial viability of small press publishers vs. online journals?

SB: I just know it’s expensive going to print. Just look at the big newspapers that are shutting down or selling right now. Print no longer seems to be where people are getting either their news or reading material, and I think we’re moving more to the online end of the spectrum.

In one issue of Contrary, we had nearly 100,000 page views – there’s no way we could afford to print 100,000 issues, or even 20,000 issues for that matter. I think a lot of it is the economy, but some of it is environmentalism – we’ve all seen journals give thousands of back issues away for free. It’s sad because there is something to the hardcopy print world and the tactile feeling of a book, magazine or journal. Unfortunately it’s expensive to do these days.

DJ: A hundred-thousand views is huge. When you think about a journal like Contrary, if it was exclusively in print as opposed to online, it would probably be a regional-type press.

SB: Definitely. And if anyone weren’t from the University of Chicago, or around the South Side, it would just be word-of-mouth subscriptions. People would read their classmates who were published in there, and that’s how it would spread cross country.

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When Brian Turner and I spoke a little while ago, he was preparing for a series of poetry workshops as well as revising his upcoming collection, Talk the Guns (to be released by Alice James Books toward the end of the year), the title of which comes from a fire command team leaders give to their fire teams, often during combat. “An evocative phrase”, as Turner put it.

The poems in his first collection (Here, Bullet, © 2005, Alice James Books) reflect in lucid detail his own experiences as an infantryman in Iraq. In addition to discussing how his military experience continues to influence his work, we also touched upon other places from where he draws his language, his early influences, and his role in the ongoing conversation around the war itself.

DJ: Are you consciously aware of how the military language comes into your work? Can you remember back before the military to what your language was like, and how it’s shifted?

BT: With these two books, I can see the effect and influence, and how the language drives the line. It affects the psychology, too, in the type of language I’m using. I’m sure there are subtler effects I’m not yet aware of. It might take some time to figure out the deeper psychological influence.

On the surface, and in the lines themselves, I can see the lingo and jargon that’s used “on the job.” I’d have to go back to some of my old stuff and see what’s there, because my family has generationally been in the military, so the language was always sort of there, just not as much when I was younger.

DJ: I’ve heard other writers use the expression “drive the line” before. As if the words are there, though not exactly a conscious thing. The poem’s already moving, you’ve already accessed what you need to say, and the language wells up because it’s in your makeup.

BT: Imagine a phrase comes to mind. I sit around with it for a week or two. I write it down quite a bit. I try to start a poem, but it doesn’t work. I try again, and it still doesn’t work. I stew on it. Whatever the phrase might be – maybe military jargon, or something I used when I was in uniform – it has a certain music.

I play trumpet and bass as well, and it’s similar to when you’re writing a song. You start off in a certain key, which leads to certain notes. I might not be aware of them ahead of time, or I might not be prepared for them. Maybe I was just noodling around, and suddenly it feels like it’s being birthed on its own, like there’s a connection that leads to certain pathways. If that makes any sense at all (laughter).

I think the words drive and create certain possibilities that come forward from them and feel natural in the process of doing so. If it feels unnatural, then there must be a reason for feeling that way, or I just need to scrap it and try over.

DJ: It’s not like you’re trying to force something where it doesn’t belong.

BT: Yeah. It’s like when you hear false notes, you know it’s not right. You keep working at it.

DJ: So the music of the poem, especially playing bass and trumpet, must be very important to you.

BT: Language is musical. The way we speak, the phrases we use…music is inherent in the language itself. Playing an instrument, it has an influence, but I don’t think it matters so much. I like the rhythms of language. That’s why I gravitated to poetry more than prose. I’m still learning how to write a sentence. Maybe once I figure that out I’ll dabble at something longer (laughter).

DJ: I know you were in Bosnia as well as Iraq. Being around these other languages, was there a sense of allure to their musicality?

BT: It starts back here in the Central Valley, California. My father was a Russian linguist in the Army. His main hobby, even to this day – he’s trying to learn Thai, Cambodian – is to learn parts of new languages while brushing up on stuff he’s previously studied. I was sort of raised in that environment.

I’m not multi-lingual in any way. I know a few phrases here and there. When I was in Bosnia, it was frustrating because I didn’t have much contact with Bosnians. I wasn’t out patrolling the streets and meeting people. In Iraq, I was out meeting and talking to people. It was more intriguing in that sense.

DJ: Were there other writers in your family?

BT: Several. My aunt – she’s not published, but all my life I looked to her as the wordsmith of our family. She seems to have more knowledge than the dictionary has in her head. A very amazing woman. My dad as well. He’s not a writer, per say, but his affinity for and interest in language affected me. Also my uncle was an English teacher who lives about an hour away. He would drop off books that were above my grade and reading level. So it was inspiring, encouraging and challenging. And I’d send him stories or poems and he’d comment back, try to encourage and urge. It was very helpful.

DJ: You have these split influences, which is quite interesting. I’m curious, outside of war writers and things like that, who were your earlier influences?

BT: Some of them are still my influences. I mentioned this elsewhere, and it’s a question I should have considered more carefully earlier. These people, my uncle, my aunt, they’re big influences, but I’d say one of my biggest influences is a guy who doesn’t even write any longer. The guitarist in my band, a guy named Brian Voigt. I’ve known him since I was seven. He’s brilliant. He’s helped shape a lot of my thoughts about art by the arguments we’ve had over art through the years.

In a similar way, a poet named Stacey Brown, who I was in graduate school with, is my best reader. She seems to know my work better than I do, and knows how to challenge me. A lot of people in the MFA program for that matter. Their influence lasts to this day as well. A guy named Nick Barrett was always saying, “Compression.” It wasn’t a new idea, exactly, but it was new to me, and I got it from Nick.

DJ: Tell me about compression in your work. It seems to me that there’s just enough air between your lines where it’s not completely flattened. Is that what you mean? That idea of keeping the story dense? Because there is a good density to your work. Not too dense. More like a happy medium.

BT: If it feels like the work comes close to it, then I owe it to the people who helped me revise. As I was writing the first book, and still now, the word “compression” is in the back of my head. Often there’s a part of me that wants to tell too much and do too much of the reader’s work. I really have to focus on cutting so I leave some of the work for the reader to do, sort of create the “unsaid,” in a sense.

There’s a poem, TWO STORIES DOWN, where a man jumps off a building. Hopefully people have to figure out “why” for themselves, because the narrative doesn’t really address the reason behind it. And who kills who at the end. That kind of thing.

It’s almost one of those cheesy stories with a sort of “cliffhanger ending”, in a sense, but I think that poem is one of the most blatant for what we’re talking about now, because the lines are compressed a bit.

The lines themselves, musically…I have a tendency to use a lot of anapestic rhythm, that rolling sort of, “du-du-dum-du-du-dum” stuff, which I like a lot, but I wind up with a lot of “fors” and “ands” and other connective tissue language. Then in the revising process I try to compress and cut those out to heighten the pressure of the language. It works sometimes and sometimes it doesn’t.

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David Horowitz, writer and head of Rose Alley Press was minding his booth at Wordstock when I stopped by and introduced myself. He was about to release his newest book, Stars Beyond the Battlesmoke, and we spoke briefly about Rose Alley as well as his work. During our interview a few weeks later, I learned that beyond the duties of the creating and publishing, Horowitz works full-time for a downtown Seattle law firm, and devotes additional hours to tending to the needs of his elderly mother. Only then does he sit down to handle the duties of publishing and the demands of the writing life. Part one of our interview focuses on the challenges of publishing, personal integrity and begins to get into his craft as a writer. Part two will appear later in the year. You can read his work on the Rose Alley author page.

(DJ): Between your work as a writer and managing Rose Alley, what struggles do you encounter trying to honor both, and where do you feel there may be some overlap?

(DH): There is overlapping – big time – for me. I’m not fundamentally a commercial publisher. I’m not somebody who’s going to publish something to make money, and then say, “OK, now I have to get to my serious art.” That’s not the way I work. What I publish is what I consider to be my serious art. I’ll take whatever losses come with trying to get it out there.

I don’t have a commercial line and an aesthetic line. The aesthetic line is it. So it’s a tough sell. But it does give me, personally, a lot of energy and sense of commitment to the press, because I’m publishing stuff I really want to sell. I’m not feeling half-hearted about selling it. There’s a strong sense of energized, sincere commitment that you gain by being a purely aesthetic publisher as opposed to publishing something you don’t particularly believe in just to make some money.

Now, there are ways in which the publishing impinges on my own creativity. Publishing is not glamorous. It is often very foolishly stereotyped as something that is glamorous or that entails activities performed by king-making, wealthy people and that kind of nonsense. I don’t make much money in terms of my overall intake, and I lose money as a publisher. But I’m very committed to it.

What impinges is the constant publicity that a small publisher has to do in order to promote the work sufficiently. That means readings, which includes producing fliers for each reading because you have to. People aren’t just going to go to a reading because it’s a reading. There might be 15 or 20 readings on a given night in Seattle. You have to get out there and promote. That’s time consuming. I’d rather spend my time doing research or writing poems. Sending out emails can get old, but it’s something you have to do if you want to sell books. You’ve got to commit to producing good looking work and promotional materials that make people believe this is solid stuff. The editing of brochures, the creation and distribution of email fliers…it’s not glamorous. I’d rather be doing other things sometimes, but it’s necessary. That’s probably the biggest conflict right there.

If there is overlapping, in an odd way, it’s that the socializing you do at a book fair or with your fellow writers can help create a sense of literary community that would otherwise not exist. You deepen your sense of commitment because you all understand you’re in a difficult marketplace. You get a deeper appreciation for one another’s struggles, which deepens your sense of community and commitment to one another. That’s a pleasure. It alleviates that sense of arduous loneliness that can often attend to the publisher’s responsibilities.

(DJ): I love that language…”arduous loneliness…”

(DH): It can be that way. You’re staying up till three or four in the morning sending out email messages and you have to be at work three hours later. It’s that kind of field.

(DJ): Jumping into some of your poems then . . . there’s the final line in the poem, “No Given”:

“Integrity must battle to survive,
In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.”

Could you jump into that line and flash it back toward your work? Especially having heard you say what you said, and visualizing this poem taking place as a scene, it’s as if we each encounter that moment when we’re thinking, “Wouldn’t it be great if we were off doing this, but my integrity keeps me here.” How does that align with everything you just told me?

(DH): I value that poem highly. I don’t tend to write what you might call “statement poems” all that often, but this is kind of a statement poem.

“Integrity must battle to survive.” Yes. That epitomizes, really, the struggle of the principled artist in a corrupt word. The last line is an attempt to soften, a little bit, the potential for finger wagging sanctimony when one urges integrity as a moral ideal. In a sense, “Integrity must battle to survive.” Because, the line before it: “Day’s bribe, threat, and deceit still live–no, thrive.” That’s what you’re faced with.

Here’s an example. I never violate privacy in order to sell. In the world though, that stuff does go on. It’s amazing how much privacy is violated to find out people’s buying habits. Then stuff comes back through that data and now people think they have a better chance to sell to you. Sometimes it’s done above board and sometimes it’s not. I won’t do that. I’d rather starve than violate people’s privacy to find out their buying habits. I’ll take my chances on being an honest person. That’s not necessarily everybody’s approach. Some could care less about privacy. All kinds of databases and lists are gathered by questionable means.

The line, “In shadowed lunar scene must sharpen sight.” Well the “shadowed lunar scene” is a kind of penumbral reality . . . the penumbral moral decision making we have to face. It’s tough sometimes to know what integrity means. It’s tough to make decisions. Sometimes people who might seem good aren’t good. Sometimes people are angry but they have a good reason for anger. Or they don’t have good reason. It’s difficult to know. It’s rarely absolutely clear just what integrity does entail. On one hand, I have a strong sense of integrity. By the same token, I want to emphasize with the last line that making decisions that inhere of integrity is often tough. It can be tricky.

There are two places I will never compromise on integrity, ever, in any shape or form. One being, the art itself. You’ve got to say what you’ve got to say. You can’t sit there and worry if something’s going to be popular. You can’t go there. I say what I really think needs to be said. Number two, the basic morality, as a publisher at least, of selling. Not cheating people, not manipulating people, no baiting and switching, spying on their computer habits…none of that garbage.

(DJ): Regarding your integrity to the art itself, I’m reminded of our first conversation when we discussed your adherence to form. I’m curious about your drafting process, since your final versions are so particular to the form that you hope to convey. As you explained, there’s something in the form that in a way creates more beauty. What do your first drafts look like?

(DH) A couple of points. First, I call myself a rhyme addict. I will frequently start poems with what I call “rhyme seeds.” A rhyme strikes me as being particularly strong, and I write it down. Then, some kind of, often, very metrical line hits me. And I have an epigram…a two-liner or a four-liner. Sometimes I feel it has everything I need to say. Sometimes I feel it doesn’t. Then I really work more with a kind of putty. I’ll have a couplet or quatrain that’s pretty strict or finished, but if I don’t feel it has everything that needs to be said, I work more with drafts that have less metrical lines, maybe have off-rhymes that are really more off than I wanted, or images that are a little too nascent. So I often start with a rhyme-originated couplet or quatrain that helps me generate another few quatrains or lines that are less well-formed.

I’m also kind of an artistic libertarian. I believe everyone should be writing what they really want to write. If they’re not comfortable in form, I’m not going to berate a person for being some kind of inferior poet. There are a lot of really good free verse writers and a lot of bad formalists. I hesitate to embrace form as a kind of adjunct to a political dogma. By the same token, I’m not afraid to announce my presence. I do love rhyme and meter, and I do so unabashedly. I hope not dogmatically, but unabashedly.

I think of poetry as the intersection of language and music. Form, specifically rhyme and meter, helps convey the musical sense to the words you’re using. Form can especially help with witty poetry. It helps sharpen the sense of atmosphere, mood, tone, resonance – obviously consonants, alliteration, lots of rhetorical devices help do that too, but rhyme and meter, especially when they’re used in particular cases and not just generically, give a lot to a poem.

Consider the most basic, elementary example, which is Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” It’s not iambic. It’s trochaic. Think about the Native American subject matter. If you go iambic, you’re going, “bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM.” Trochaic is the inverse. You’re going, “BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum BUM bum.” It’s the perfect sound of an Indian drum. So the shift of the meter changes the mood and tone of how the language is conveyed. If it were iambic, you wouldn’t get much of a sense of Native American drumming or rhythm. Trochaic – that is so perfectly chosen. That’s just one example, but there are many of using form not just as a rational structure or generic default because you don’t have the creative energy to think individually, but instead to reflect the theme, tone and emotions in the writing. It’s a wonderful tool to do that.