Kent MacCarter, expatriate of Minnesota, Montana and New Mexico, former resident of Florence and Sienna, Italy, is now a permanent resident in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, son and two cats. MacCarter came to Australia in 2004 to study poetry and writing. In the Hungry Middle of Here, his first collection of poetry, is published by Transit Lounge Press. In 2012, another poetry collection, Ribosome Spreadsheet, will be released as well as a non-fiction anthology he is currently co-editing on expatriate writers now living and writing from Australia. His career in Australia has chiefly been in educational and academic publishing as a developmental editor for multimedia, online resources, and ebooks. He currently sits on the executive board of The Small Press Network, an advocate association for small presses as they meet challenges of the digital revolution in publishing. MacCarter is Managing Editor for Cordite Poetry Journal and an active member in Melbourne PEN.

The interview for this second part of the series is with Jonathon Holden. Jonathan Holden has published 17 books, a mixture of poetry and literary criticism. In 1986, he received the Kansas State University Distinguished Faculty Award. In 2000, he was a member of the committee that selects the Pulitzer Prize winner in poetry. He has twice received a National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship. In 1995, the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Yusef Komunyakaa chose Holden’s poetry collection, The Sublime, for the Vassar Miller Prize. He was anointed Kansas’ first poet laureate in 2005. He is a former Hugo student and has written widely on Hugo.

Interview with Jonathan Holden, 12 January 2006, revised 12 May 2011

KM: What was your relationship to Hugo when researching for Landscapes of the Self: The Development of Richard Hugo’s Poetry? Were you a student of his? What drew you to Hugo and his poems?

JH: I think that I was always temperamentally inclined towards Dick’s poetry, toward “confessional” poetry, though “personal” poetry might be closer to le mot juste. After The New Criticism of the Fifties, fashioned in the impersonal will of T.S. Eliot, who was so dogged in keeping his own and the poet’s personal life out of poetry, personal poetry, begun in 1956 with Ginsberg’s “HOWL”, was a breath of fresh air. Dick Hugo was one of the first American poets to write confessional poems. But fashions change: now they look old hat and somewhat self-indulgent. Back in the late sixties and early seventies, a male poet could be mobbed by female fans. But the decorum of the business – po-biz as Louis Simpson termed it – has changed.

KM: Hugo repeatedly visited and revisited Pacific Northwest moods, socialisation, and landscapes throughout his writing career, albeit from fresh angles as he grew both as a writer and a human. Do you think this is indicative of a poet with limited ability (no matter how exemplary that poet’s niche is) or is this support for an unarguably gifted poetic voice, one able to mine similar themes and locations over a lifetime with largely successful results?

JH: Hugo’s ‘stock’ has, since the seventies, lost considerable value, though some of his poems like “Degrees of Gray …” are eternal.

KM: You have been bestowed the honour of Poet Laureate of Kansas. In what manner have you felt at all encouraged or hindered from exploring landscapes foreign to that region from this label? Early on in your research, did you find Hugo (and his oft bandied tag as Pacific Northwest poet) drawing similar or perpendicular conclusions to those you’ve developed?

JH: I was always attracted to the Pacific Northwest and its writers and always will be. For whatever reason, probably because I’m from New Jersey, I have always looked west for “the real world”.

KM: Can you recall of any town or particular place, recently, where something in the manner of, “This would have triggered Richard,” occurred to you? If so, what? Where?

JH:Probably the most aesthetically attractive place I know of is Santa Fe, New Mexico, but I have always ruled out “place” as factor in creativity, believing, as Stevens did, in the Imagination.

KM: I am particularly interested in Hugo’s varied uses of landscapism. To what extent do you feel that Hugo’s “triggering towns”, (most importantly his general necessity of their anonymity) and the resulting poems those towns catalysed, mirror reflections of Hugo’s visceral id, let alone his psyche as a whole? Hugo, Stafford, and Wagoner all wrote with the “commoner” persona aesthetic in mind for much of their work. Is there anything, now, that you might expound upon regarding this that you did not include in your book on him?

JH: Hugo was a formula poet, always looking a formula. This is what “The Triggering Town” is about. It’s a decided weakness in Dick. And he knew it. Folks like Bill Stafford knew it; and one of the things about Stafford which I keep rediscovering is the power and range of his mind. It was encyclopedic.

KM: You have authored numerous volumes on rhetoric, style, character, etc., on contemporary American poetry. In what manner do you consider Richard Hugo’s poems relevant and timely within the sphere of contemporary American poetry? Hugo has been more overlooked than embraced by writers today – why do you think that is?

JH: Hugo’s poetry has fallen out of fashion, except for a couple of poems like “Degrees of Gray”. This is probably inevitable. But to have even one poem last like “Degrees …” is no mean feat. But today poetry itself is an increasingly marginal art.

KM: Hugo labeled himself a regionalist poet (going so far as to attest he didn’t much care for those who weren’t). Do you agree? Or did he manage to transcend many of the shackles that label feeds upon with his successful Italy and Scotland books?

JH: Hugo is a regionalist poet.

KM: Via poetry, Hugo was a superlative delivery man for the very grounded, very “real” aspects of the human condition and messages therein. What is something unique only to Hugo (versus, say, Stafford or Levine who also did this well) that made his poems so effective?

JH: Of the three folks you mention, Hugo, Stafford and Levine, Levine continues to have the highest market-value; and he has won the highest awards. He was always the most ambitious and hence has stayed au courant.

KM: Hugo is an author with mesmerising control of both lineation and word choice, pillars of a poem’s overall sound. Beginning with his early poems and their imperfections through to his peak career poems (such as the macho tirade of “Lady in Kicking Horse Reservoir”) and on to the more emotionally content and staid later poems, Hugo’s collected works reads much like a symphony with three discernible movements. Excluding all else, can you comment specifically on Hugo’s progression and changes in poetic sound over the course of his career? Or, do you find the sound of his poems relatively static over that duration?

JH: I think that Hugo’s iambic music has been one of the constants of his life. The positive? A “style” that is inimitable. The negative? A style grown complacent.

KM: In a recent interview, you mention how, “The ability to be totally original in poetry is limited, the students and grown-up poets I know, 98% of their poems are stolen in the sense they rehash older music … just think of the line of descent from Guthrie to Dylan to Springsteen. There’s a very solid line of descent there”. We can add Jimmie Rogers and Jeff Tweedy before and after this list too. Endless. However, I feel that every artist, writer, etc., leaves distinct marks that are forever and only theirs. What would you say was Hugo’s unique mark?

JH: What will Dick be remembered for? The Last Good Kiss You Had Was Years Ago, the novel by Jim Crumley by the title “The Last Good Kiss” and “The Triggering Town”. If, as seems unlikely at this historical moment, the art of poetry acquires significant cachet again, Hugo could come into fashion again. We’ll see.

Emily Jones reading
Robert Stubblefield reading

Emma Torzs reading
Joanna Klink reading

Coffee House Press, 2008.
Review by Tristan Beach

Patricia Smith writes with great fierceness and intimacy. Her collection of poems, Teahouse of the Almighty, a National Poetry Series-winner, contains many of Smith’s most striking and candid verses. She frames this brilliant little volume with an epigraph quoted from the late Gwendolyn Brooks:

If thou be more than hate or atmosphere
Step forth in splendor, mortify our wolves.
Or we assume a sovereignty ourselves.

Taken from Brooks’ sonnet, “god works in a mysterious way,” I believe the speaker calls upon God to assert spiritual power and order over a chaotic world. Smith’s poems seem to invoke the poetic spirit of Brooks, who acts as guide and mentor in the younger poet’s verses. Smith’s keen attention to form, despite her use of free verse, as well as her constant themes of poverty, race, sexuality, violence, and the revitalizing, empowering aspects of poetry, each attest to Brooks’ presence in this volume. However, these poems are Smith’s creation—whatever her apparent influences are, each verse is recognizably, undeniably hers.

Smith’s poem, “Giving Birth to Soldiers,” echoes the sentiment of the epigraph, as well as Brooks’ famous “sonnet-ballad.” The poem begins:

She will pin ponderous medals to her
housedress, dripping the repeated roses,
while she claws through boxes filled with
him and then him.

The speaker observes Tabitha Bonilla, a young woman who loses her husband and her father to the Iraq War within the space of a single year. Smith’s initial tone, apparently disaffected (with small underpinnings of lament and anger), eventually swells, embittered, yet ironic: “And she will ask a bemused God / for guidance as she steps back into line, / her womb tingling vaguely with the next soldier.” Smith focuses upon Tabitha, noting that life’s basic pleasures have lost their taste in the wake of sudden death. The speaker feels the void, the disillusionment that Tabitha feels, and forlornly looks toward a future of perpetuating death.

Smith exercises restraint in “Giving Birth”; the poem could easily be an outpouring of grief, but here the cries just penetrate the poem’s toned down surface, evoking a sense of smoldering, undirected anger. However, this is not to say that Teahouse is without wit or outbursts. Smith’s poem, “Drink, You Motherfuckers,” observes an open-mic event at a seedy bar, run by an “insane Mexican barkeep” named Sergio. The speaker declares the event “an odd parade of eggshells / and desperadoes,” occupied by poets who are “duly convinced / that [their] lines had leapt / / from the cocktail napkin, / sliced through the din, / and changed Chicago.” Smith’s observations, made with a snicker, are incisive, to say the least. However, Smith identifies with these poets, especially in the final lines in which Sergio blasts his customers, these pretentious poets, into humility:

He waved a sudden gun,
a clunky thing that sparked
snickers until he blasted

a hole in the ceiling and
revised our endings,
smalling our big drunken lives.

Smith’s tight lines constrict (and thereby accentuate) the preposterous, booze-filled evening.
Teahouse of the Almighty evokes anger, hilarity, disillusionment, and humility in equal doses. Smith’s language, wit, form, and concentrated presence, testify to poetry’s ability to empower the speaker and her subject. With grit and intimacy, she interrogates circumstance and misfortune, and locates a thread of hope within each poem.

Kirsi Marcus reading

Elizabeth Robinson reading

Kent MacCarter, expatriate of Minnesota, Montana and New Mexico, former resident of Florence and Sienna, Italy, is now a permanent resident in Melbourne, Australia with his wife, son and two cats. MacCarter came to Australia in 2004 to study poetry and writing. In the Hungry Middle of Here, his first collection of poetry, is published by Transit Lounge Press. In 2012, another poetry collection, Ribosome Spreadsheet, will be released as well as a non-fiction anthology he is currently co-editing on expatriate writers now living and writing from Australia. His career in Australia has chiefly been in educational and academic publishing as a developmental editor for multimedia, online resources, and ebooks. He currently sits on the executive board of The Small Press Network, an advocate association for small presses as they meet challenges of the digital revolution in publishing. MacCarter is Managing Editor for Cordite Poetry Journal and an active member in Melbourne PEN.

The first interview is with David Wagoner. David Wagoner has published 18 books of poems, most recently A Map of the Night (U. of Illinois Press, 2008), and Copper Canyon Press will publish his 19th, After the Point of No Return, in 2012. He has also published ten novels, one of which, The Escape Artist, was made into a movie by Francis Ford Coppola. He won the Lilly Prize in 1991, six yearly prizes from Poetry, and the Arthur Rense Prize for Poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2011. He was a chancellor the Academy of American Poets for 23 years. He edited Poetry Northwest from 1966 to 2002, and he is professor emeritus of English at the U. of Washington. He teaches at the low‐residency MFA program of the Whidbey Island Writers Workshop.

Interview with David Wagoner on 2 April 2006, revised 5 May 2011

KM: Beneficial or not, yourself, Richard Hugo, and William Stafford have been typecast as the poetic progeny of Roethke – at least large portions of your and their work has. I feel that statutes of limitations on that possible fact have run out. Can you tell me about an early interaction you had with Hugo, his work and what of him/it made his a voice to be independently reckoned with?

DW: Hugo and I were both students of Roethke, both grateful to him and admiring of him, but Stafford was a product of the U. of Iowa writing program and never had much good to say about Ted’s work. I don’t believe any of the three of us show even slight traces of direct influence from him. Dick and I lived and worked in the University District and saw each other fairly often, sometimes with Jim Wright, and exchanged critiques of our poems over beer. At the time he was a technical writer for Boeing, a long‐time Seattleite, and I was a newcomer from the Midwest who’d never encountered such a bewildering primitive world as the Cascade and Olympic Mountains, Puget Sound, the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and the Pacific shore. Dick helped me begin penetrating those places by taking me fishing.

KM: Your poem “A Valedictory to Standard Oil of Indiana” utilizes the social and economic environment of your youth in the greater Gary, IN area. Hugo’s poem, “Duwamish Head”, does the same for him. Philip Levine has poems of similar ilk. Do you think that being enveloped in working‐ middle‐class environs at such a young age provides a poet with any truer (or heightened might be more apt) sense of being and writing about being part of the human condition?

DW: My “working class background” was a complicated mixture. My father had a degree magna cum laude in classical languages and worked all his life in a steel mill, winding up as melter foreman in the open hearth. He was too shy to teach, he said. We lived in one of the most intensely polluted areas in the country, where everything natural had to struggle to keep existing. The change to the Pacific Northwest was a major shock to my feelings about nature. Earlier, I’d had the shock of leaving small‐town Ohio farmland at age 7 and trying to cope with a polluted swamp across the street with Standard Oil of Indiana (then the world’s largest single refinery). My psychotopes have been struggling with each other ever since.

KM: Hugo consistently visited and revisited Pacific Northwest moods, socialization, and landscapes throughout his writing career, albeit from fresh angles as he grew both as a writer and a human. Do you think this is indicative of a poet with limited ability (no matter exemplary that poet’s niche is) or is this support for an unarguably gifted poetic voice, one able to mine similar themes and locations over a lifetime with largely successful results?

DW: Dick was never much interested in the natural world except for fish. He didn’t know the names of birds and plants and never looked at any of them closely. He didn’t like to walk, let alone hike, and to my knowledge never went anywhere he couldn’t reach by car. He wrote about his relationships with people, his disappointments with them and himself and the towns and districts they all tried to get along with. He had almost no interest in mythology, Indian lore, history, politics, or environmental issues. In a review of one of my books in a local weekly, Dick called me “the most Elizabethan of our poets” and went on to praise my versatility, the wide range of my subject matter, forms, voices, etc. He himself almost never lightened his tone. He was very funny in conversation, but wrote very few funny poems. He never, as far as I can remember, speeded up the tempo of a poem for more than a moment and almost never tried for a voice other than his own. As far as I know, he never tried to write a play or a song lyric or dramatized somebody else’s problems in a poem.

KM: You were editor of Poetry Northwest from 1966‐2002. To what degree did you glean Hugo mimicry from the submissions you received? Is there any one attribute that stands out?

DW: I received many poems from Dick’s students at the U. of Montana, and they were almost always recognizable without my having to check the return addresses. They were all caught up by his dogged, downright, blunt iambics and had a hard time branching out. Some were very good at it, but few had any idea how to be lyrical. Hugo was very briefly one of the early sub‐editors of Poetry Northwest. I remember he told me he had told them he wanted sometimes to use what he called a Permanent Rejection Slip. The other editors didn’t allow it.

KM: Can you recall of any town or particular place, recently, where something in the manner of ‘This place would have triggered Richard’ occurred to you? If so, what or where?

DW: I haven’t seen any places that Dick missed.

KM: As Thom Gunn and those in The Movement did for English poetry, do you (or did you) feel at all brethren with Hugo in bestowing similar affects and themes on American poetry? Not solely writing in a confessional sense, but writing about the more visceral and honest tendencies of humans ‐ boozing, working, fucking, hurting, insecurities of the everyman, etc.

DW: I can’t answer this one coherently. I write what’s possible for me to write and often try what’s impossible. I’ve never taken drugs or had a drinking problem, but I’ve been a newspaper reporter, part of whose beat in the Chicago suburbs included two of the most corrupt towns in the country: East Chicago, Indiana, and Calumet City, Illinois, and I’ve used them in fiction and poetry ever since, not just the natural world.

KM: I’m not sure if you’re familiar with his work, but David Plowden’s photographs move me in directions that many poems do. When I see Plowden’s prints of cantilever bridges over the Ohio River, my knee‐jerk sensation is that I have been transported to James Wright Country; Plowden’s photographs of an empty, straight‐as‐an‐arrow by‐way in Montana teleport me into Richard Hugo Country; countries that exist at the intersection of word and image. What do you think the dangers and rewards are for a poem being, ostensibly, a written photograph of place?

DW: I can’t recall ever having written a poem based on a photo except one taken of a family reunion. The danger of the practice is probably the most obvious: if you don’t have the photo beside the poem, the reader may have a poor idea of what you’re talking about. You can be tempted to rely too heavily on somebody else’s vision.

Andrew Gray reading

Karen Volkman reading

Montana Prize in Fiction Judge – Benjamin Percy

Benjamin Percy is the author of two novels, Red Moon (forthcoming from Grand Central/Hachette in 2012) and The Wilding, as well as two books of stories, Refresh, Refresh and The Language of Elk. His fiction and nonfiction have been published by Esquire, GQ, Men’s Journal, Outside, the Wall Street Journal, and the Paris Review. His honors inlcude a fellowship from the NEA, the Whiting Writers’ Award, the Plimpton Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and inclusion in Best American Short Stories and Best American Comics.

Montana Prize in Creative Nonfiction Judge – Eula Biss

Eula Biss holds a BA in nonfiction writing from Hampshire College and an MFA in nonfiction writing from the University of Iowa. Her second book, Notes from No Man’s Land, received the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Her work has also been recognized by a Pushcart Prize, a Jaffe Writers’ Award, and a 21st Century Award from the Chicago Public Library. She teaches writing at Northwestern University and is working on a new book about myth and metaphor in medicine with the support of a Guggenheim Fellowship and a Howard Foundation Fellowship. Her essays have recently appeared in The Best American Nonrequired Reading, The Best Creative Nonfiction and the Touchstone Anthology of Contemporary Nonfiction as well as in The Believer, Gulf Coast, Columbia, Ninth Letter, the North American Review, the Bellingham Review, the Seneca Review, and Harper’s.

Patricia Goedicke Prize in Poetry Judge – Bhanu Kapil

Bhanu Kapil lives in Colorado where she teaches writing and thinking at Naropa University’s Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, as well as Goddard College’s low-residency MFA.  She has written four full-length cross-genre works–The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers (Kelsey Street Press, 2001), Incubation: a space for monsters (Leon Works, 2006), humanimal [a project for future children] (Kelsey Street Press, 2009), and Schizophrene (forthcoming, Nightboat Books).